


The Eyes, the Mouth, and the Mirror

by A B Champe (Reginald_Magpie)



Category: A Series of Unfortunate Events (TV), A Series of Unfortunate Events - Lemony Snicket, All the Wrong Questions - Lemony Snicket
Genre: Abusive People In General TBH, Abusive Relationships, Alternative Perspective, F/F, F/M, Jacques Snicket is a CSA victim and you can rip that from my cold dead hands, M/M, Pre-Canon, Pre-Series Post-Questions, Teen Angst, V.F.D examined as Not The Best Thing In The World, VFD sucks, oh yeah also, surviving abuse, third person present tense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-09
Updated: 2018-05-03
Packaged: 2018-12-13 11:01:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 13
Words: 36,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11758446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Reginald_Magpie/pseuds/A%20B%20Champe
Summary: "Three shards of pottery, and a deep, thick shroud, are required on occasions such as these. To conceal the eyes, the mouth, the mirror." ⸻The brightest generation of the V.F.D. were born under decaying stars; the previous generation had made this organization noble, but the secret of that nobility was lost in translation. This generation of young volunteers have always had one foot out the door, but these coming years will make them question whether the organization was ever good to begin with, whether their friends and associates could ever have been trusted, and whether the desperation not to be alone or the desperation to serve "the better good" is greater.It may also teach them what resides at the bottom of a not-quite ocean, and how that great unknown shaped the organization we known today.(A complex pre-ASOUE look into V.F.D., some headcanons about events of the time period, and a mess of unhealthy relationships I do not condone or believe should be aspired to.)





	1. Introduction

_ (to K. Snicket, care of L. Snicket) _

Dear, 

I know this letter isn’t like me. I am not a writer. I have never been an do not intend to be a writer. I grew up with brilliant and awful authors all around me, but words have always had less meaning to me written rather than spoken. 

Eloquence, a word which a strange dictionary I once found among an associate's belongings informed me means grace and a reserved sense of well put togetherness, has always regretfully escaped me. But there are events here, clues, a string of breadcrumbs through the woods, which need to be documented, and documented fairly, without homage paid to an organization's nobility. 

I have not been wholly honest in the past, and I do not intend to be honest in the future. Just as written words hang less loud and sure in the air than their spoken kin, so do they conceal their contents a great deal better. Concealment is my last chance at a shred of honesty, a shard of what I could have been. 

I do not mean to clear my name with the attached account, so I have obscured it, matched it to the others presented; yours included. 

We have all done terrible things, Kit. I know that. I fear the years coming for us next will be still more terrible. There are nights I lie awake and think only of the things I have done and how they've affected you, or L, and the things I will do soon to drive you further from me, in the name of this war. We will lose. We won't survive this. None of us will. Our records will be gone by the end of the next generation, but I want this, a few moments of a few years which were the foundation, our foundation, for what this organization has become, to be among them when they burn. 

I am not a writer. I will not tell you or anyone else not to read the words that follow this letter,  but I will tell them not to expect a masterpiece. I will convince no one of anything, but I'm sorry Kit, I need someone to remember. I won't likely be alive to. I hope this finds you. Do what you will with it. 

With an unfortunate love for you, and for L,  
_Anonymous_

 

* * *

A dissatisfied and irresolute color fills the western sky, the overcast light results in a unique dusk-like stillness through the entirety of the day. Amongst the fog wrapped thick around the buildings he has always dreaded, the smoke of a young man’s cigarette rises as if cautious to join it's vaporous kin. 

The building before him no longer smolders, it crouches among blades of brown autumn grass, a black skeleton of something that once was. In the blue haze, the cherry of the cigarette burns bright red.The young man holds back a smile as he exhales and it begins to rain. He looks down at something clutched in his free hand. Gingerly held open, the book seems hand copied, and he reads it with a private delight as his eyes sift through the soot, searching, excitedly, like a child on an easter egg hunt, for something. 

_ A test has been completed. This is science _ , he thinks giddily, _ this is science in its rawest form and we are an organization of research, of questions answered. This is what we were meant to be doing.  _

The young man's smile falls, though, as he thinks of an associate, who will be sorely disappointed. He asks the first of half a dozen questions which will slowly unwind him; When and where was the first fire? Why? 

 

Somewhere else,  there is a young woman. She sits in the rain on a grey concrete bench, pen to paper. Her ink begins to run and she continues writing. The letter her pen dances across is an important one; it will spare a friend. Sometimes she's uncertain he deserves saving, but today she is more resolute than the buildings of the academy she dreads retiring to after finishing this letter.

Regardless of her intent, the ink runs and it will be illegible. Thus will be the first of many misunderstandings and misgivings which will lead to one of a hundred dominoes being stacked to fall into one of the most unfortunate series of events to ever transpire. 

The letter will reach its intended by way of an award winning racing homer pigeon, but it will do so waterlogged and so late that the man intended to receive it will have mere moments to try to decipher the smudged ink before he is forced to escape through a trapdoor and lose track of something which is direly important. She, of course, does not know this, and continues writing despite the set of eyes fixed carefully on her from a cafe across the street. This will prove to be one of Beatrice's greatest mistakes. 

 

Somewhere else still, a gaunt man with slender hands which resemble long-legged spiders and a straight, singular eyebrow, sits down. He curls his thin fingers around a glass of brandy which he does not drink but places on the small end table tucked into the corner. The chair he sits in belongs to someone else, but the small apartment belongs to him. The brandy is stolen. He sits down and begins waging one of many battles in a war he has been waging against himself for several years, which will continue for several more. A radio squabbles on in the corner, ignored. 

He has spent his day in and out of a small building which used to be a cottage tucked away downtown, privately hidden behind an expansive eucalyptus tree. He does not usually attend service there, but this is a day he needs to prove himself. He needs to be clean.

Until early this evening, this had been a sad occasion. Now he knows why he must be clean; an associate brought word at sundown that someone has been found. Someone the gaunt man believed dead. 

  
  


The sun shines through the grey clouds like patchwork, making itself a peachy bed amongst the steel wool clouds. The lawn of the school smells of the honeysuckle making a late season scramble for dominance over the broad-leafed bushes wilting away at the far end of the lawn. O wonders if anyone has ever really taken care of those bushes. 

He remembers years spent here before his apprenticeship, when he watched them die back every summer a little more. Now they’re nearly lost to the honeysuckle. Its scent is thick in the soft, cool breeze. O near gags on the sweetness. He pulls his scarf up over his mouth, and loosens the tie an older volunteer insisted he find this morning. 

A sour thought quickly soils the sweet scent caught in O’s throat. His cold, discerning eyes fix on a figure crossing the lawn. She moves toward him with purpose, and O tries to fall back into the shadows of a nearby building, but she’s already seen him. The sourness sits still and stagnant in his gut, inescapable. 

He has experienced disappointment from loved ones only a handful of times (for only a handful of people he has ever considered lovable), and he does not want to experience it again with Kit Snicket. His veins run cold at the thought.

Sometimes wicked men, O included, feel a sudden, poignant realization of their wickedness. In my experience, it is always when faced with a beautiful woman who knows they could have done better. Sometimes wicked men wish for nothing but to suddenly not be so wicked anymore. Deep in his chest, as anxiety and something which is the closest O can feel to shame wrap his heart in dark and sticky tendrils, his lungs seize and he is left almost-gasping, like he’s choking on smoke. 

“You don’t look well,” K says as she comes close enough to discern his expression, and he can suddenly discern hers. She doesn’t look angry, or disappointed, or upset at all.

Kit looks relieved. A tenseness O has seen in her face for at least the last year, maybe as long as he can remember really, is gone. Replacing it, a tired relief. He’s reminded of associates he’s seen returning after long, taxing investigations, ones which have brought them closer to death than they care to admit. The giddy almost-drunken happiness of returning home alive. His mouth feels dry as the immediate fear drains away and suddenly he does feel ill, because her not knowing yet means she’ll know soon. And he doesn’t know when.

“I think the filthy new cleaning lady gave me something,” O breathes, looking past K instead of at her. Despite her quiet tone and its slow pacing, O already feels like the conversation is a runaway train, one he has to keep on the tracks or risk something worse than death.

“You should go inside,” she says, and he can tell she wants to say something else.

“What is it?” he returns, instead of acknowledging the cigarette tucked between his first and second left fingers. 

She shifts in silence, watching him, and he watches her and the gears turning in her brain and feels something in his chest trying to push away his anxiety for the future. Kit Snicket has always been the most impressive to him when he can see her thinking. 

“H came with word this afternoon, said he was on the way to the city to tell J,” she says carefully, and O feels something click in the back of his brain, but he can’t think through the conclusion he’s just made because she continues, words suddenly coming in a quick, harsh whisper, “They’ve found L.” 


	2. Exilé sur le sol

_ ⸻ Chapter Two ⸻ _   
  


* * *

 

_ The Poet is like that wild inheritor of the cloud,  _

_ A rider of storms, above the range of arrows and slings;  _

_ Exiled on earth, at bay amid the jeering crowd,  _

_ He cannot walk for his unmanageable wings. _

 

_ Le Poète est semblable au prince des nuées _

_ Qui hante la tempête et se rit de l'archer; _

_ Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées, _

_ Ses ailes de géant l'empêchent de marcher. _

_ ⸻ _ _ Charles Baudelaire, Translated by George Dillon, 1936 _   


* * *

 

 

Jacques has eaten nothing. He has drunk only what the gnawing, thirsty beast in his gut has chided him into imbibing. He is to be judged, his book set for this year, another chapter uneditable. With the way Hector spoke to him, hushed and tense, he worries for what may be coming of that judgement. He worries about something else, too, something he will worry about for years; that he has failed that simplest of tasks given to him by his now deceased mother, a woman he worshipped more than any deity.

He remembers, of course, all the times she saved him from his own over-curiosity and dedication to the ideal of perfection or a greater good, but Jacques remembers better a time near the end of the short few years he considers his childhood, when he and his siblings had asked to go to town alone. As he was older and had shown how much responsibility he was willing to take to his then very tired parents, they agreed on the provision Jacques would make sure no harm came to Lemony or Kit. 

Despite agreeing to keep them safe, however, when passing a strange man in the street he had become convinced of his ties to the same organization to which their parents belonged. He had insisted they follow the man as he erratically moved through the city streets, and when he had approached the man, his immediate and intoxicated furious response to children following him had been enough to set Kit into tears all the way home, Lemony toddling shocked, clumsy, and silent behind her. 

Their mother had taken Jacques into her study alone, locking the door behind him before she spoke to him at length about his responsibility, as a Snicket, to look after his own, and made clear her disappointment by leaving him alone in the dark, menacing study for the rest of the night. Deep forest green shelves hung above him, full of books on gruesome subjects he didn’t want to read, and he still remembers clearly the feeling of failure seeping ice cold through his gut as the shadows of his mother’s collection of antique bottled ships crossed ominously across the waves of the bumpy textured walls.

He remembers, so clearly, the face of his brother as the door shut, faraway, still frightened.  

Jacques takes a deep breath in the present. He stands, leaving his brandy abandoned on the end table. There is a chill setting in as he looks around the small room and tries to decide what’s worth bringing with him. He settles on what can fit in the trunk of his car- 

A disguise kit, which has been half destroyed over the course of several years’ use and is now delegated to a small glass fishtank instead of the briefcase it had been stored in until that suitcase was burned in a fire at a library Jacques was visiting not two months ago,

A strange dictionary which has a number of long entries where a normal dictionary would have short or none, and a few more entries self-added by both Jacques and its previous owner,

A young adult novel detailing the life of a boy from a drowning city, his step brother, his mother, and a graveyard,

A bottle of brandy taken from a wedding of two friends, 

And a long, complicated mechanism which folds down to look suspiciously alike a periscope attached to a length of string. 

He leaves in the middle of the dark, still night, while the remainder of the rain hangs heavy on the grass and windowpanes of the small apartment building. First, however, he says his respects to the traditions of home; he leaves a small stone in the plant beside his front door, and he prays, for a moment, at his threshold. I will not disclose the exact contents of that prayer, but it will go unanswered.

Maybe he is to atone, he thinks, but he hopes that judgement of his atonement does not overlook what he’s doing now. The most noble thing he’s done since Tishrei last year at least. 

 

The road to the Mortmain mountains is long, and cold. Colder than the city. Jacques has a lot of silence to devour with thoughts of everything that could have made Hector’s voice tremble over his brother’s name like that. He fears the worst.

 

It feels like stepping into a ghost from the future to approach the backup, third-to-last hiding place which is being built in the Valley of Four Drafts. The skeleton of future wings to be added onto the Grand Library stands stark and verdant against the crystal clear waterfall and white slopes surrounding this carefully guarded location. 

As Jacques’ automobile sidles to a halt in a patch of frosted yellow mountain grass he watches a tawny form disappear behind a garden wall he remembers seeing when he and his mentor came before even the library had been framed in its final resting place. 

As is customary, the library was the first room built of a sprawling mansion you and I now know as V.F.D.’s Mortmain headquarters; and so it will be the last to burn, I have an awful, sneaking suspicion. 

It feels like walking into a legend waiting to be written to enter into the hallowed hall not-yet hallowed, but Jacques can’t help but feel that maybe this legend will be a great and famous tragedy rather than a tale of glory and nobility. He wonders how secret that tragedy may be, in the end, whether it will be forgotten. 

As the heavy, formidable door swings open, Jacques mutters softly to himself; 

“The world is quiet here,” half self-assurance that whatever he faces inside that door is manageable within the skills he possesses, and half because it is quiet. Despite the obvious safeguards, Jacques has yet to meet a soul amongst the framed emerald rooms and even the sound of the waterfall slowly freezing over seems muffled and far away. The library, however, is anything but empty, and even further from quiet. Opening the door breaks a silence Jacques only now realizes has lasted since H left his threshold with a grim and distant expression. 

Immediately inside the door, a disorganized stack of books threatens incomers with impending fall, and as sudden as his entrance Jacques can hear a voice cut off mid-sentence. It’s a voice he didn’t expect to hear here, or anywhere else ever again for that matter.

“Well something has to—” Although Jacques cannot see S. Theodora Markson through the unorganized shelves of a library not yet in order, he can hear her, and just the sound of her distinctly sharp voice is enough to conjure a picture in his mind of her wild hair, accumulating in disorderly fashion around her body like leaves accumulating in a gutter. 

“Shh, someone’s here!” he hears her mock-whisper from across the room. He shakes his head.  _ Never has there been such a foolish person as S. Theodora Markson _ , he thinks.

The early morning sun is beginning to stream through the east windows as Jacques makes his way through the shelves and stacks of books left almost-forgotten here, and comes to a halt before the woman who was previously his brother’s chaperone. He looks at her with a deep loathing in his steady-held eye contact. She’s not alone, though. 

A young man, no older than Jacques’ nineteen, crouches near her next to a hastily put together cot in the one corner devoid of books, where a small, still figure lays, and behind her is a girl no older than thirteen, who looks fearful and tired. Markson, too, looks tired, Jacques realizes as the wild haired woman’s eyes flick over him, trying to discern his current status as best she can. She has deep bruise colored pockets under her eyes, and one of her arms is bandaged, her jacket ripped at the shoulder on the same side. He offers her no sympathy. 

“Why are you here?” Jacques asks, letting every ounce of loathing fill his voice. She looks at him in the eyes again then, and he feels exhausted just looking at the blankness he’s never seen from this volunteer. 

“Because, as I was saying before you interrupted, something has to be done,” she breathes, and she looks pointedly at the young man beside the cot. 

He looks up at her, guilty, almost as tired, and then at Jacques, and decides despite Jacques’ admittedly brash entrance, that he is probably easier to talk to than Markson at the moment.

“Hello, I’m—” he begins saying, hand outstretched in greeting, when a small, hoarse voice interrupts him.

“We need to go,” the young girl says, “We don’t have time for this.” 

Markson fixes her with a glare, “I’ve told you before, no one is going to come looking for you, you did the right thing.” 

“What’s happening?” Jacques cuts in, and all three of the room’s other conscious occupants look at him, so he continues, “Why do you have to go?” 

“My chaperone will be looking for me,” the girl is the first to speak, in a shaking, uncertain voice, “and Markson’s apprentice will be looking for her, and he’s not going to live so we shouldn’t risk the whole organization on one apprentice.” Jacques feels the words hit his gut like a brick but he tries to hold his tone, now speaking directly to the girl who stands a head or two shorter than his shoulder. 

“Why are we risking the organization?” 

“Because the people who set the fire he put out will look for him, and we need this headquarters. My chaperone said this was the third-to-last-safe-place. If we lose either of the other two it may be our only chance at a future. We can’t jeopardize that for a guy who didn’t want to be a part of V.F.D. anyway.” 

“Something has to be done for him,” Markson’s voice is more insistent now. 

“Well whatever it is we can’t do it anyway,” the girl says, in an increasingly bad-tempered timbre. 

“She’s not wrong, M,” the young man, who Jacques assumes now is a doctor or nurse, or other medical expert, says, “There’s nothing I can do for him here, he’d be better off in a hospital downtown. I’m not even sure what’s wrong beyond smoke inhalation.” 

Markson looks frustrated, and the other two look upset, and Jacques sighs a long, heavy sigh. 

“M, you need to leave,” he says, finally, after a pregnant silence in which three sets of eyes are trained expectantly on him, “Take the apprentice, and go. I will make sure something is done.” 

Markson glares, but something breaks down behind her eyes and she nods. The apprentice with her gives a relieved glance toward the heavens and immediately turns on her heel. As the echoes of their footsteps recede in the library, Jacques looks at the man who is crouched by his brother, and for the first time really, at his brother, at the brother Jacques has not seen since Lemony was thirteen years old. 

The comfortable padding of baby fat Jacques remembers of the boy he last saw just weeks before the beginning of his apprenticeship is gone, his brother looks underfed at best. The look of defiance always tucked just behind a most-often-cordial expression is gone, too, replaced by a placid nothingness across his unconscious face. If Markson, the apprentice, and the doctor look tired, the prone form of Lemony Snicket looks exhausted, like sleep is something he’s come by only rarely and for short periods at best. Soot clings to every surface availed of it, across the thin, torn, and too-small shirt his brother is wearing, across his cheeks, streaked through his hair, and laid sticky and thick across exposed skin. 

He looks worse than he is, Jacques knows, but the sight echoes cold and harsh through Jacques’ chest. 

“How bad is it?” 

The young man doesn’t look at Jacques as he thinks of how to best and gently answer, instead he joins him in looking down at the unconscious form of the now-sixteen-or-seventeen year old Lemony. He’s opening his mouth to speak when that form stirs, slightly, brows furrowing for just a second and then relaxing again. 

The doctor springs into action, performing a series of tasks neither I nor Jacques Snicket will ever fully understand, as neither of us are trained medical professionals, but as he fusses about with a stethoscope and a number of small devices Jacques is almost certain are used for monitoring something or other, it doesn’t take a medical professional to say that Lemony’s next action does nothing for his condition but comes as both a shock and relief to his older brother.

Lemony sits up, suddenly, and immediately gasps in pain doing so, clutching his left side, but looking dazedly around rather than giving it more attention than that.

“My ribs hurt,” he mumbles, and it sounds like he’s talking through marbles, but Jacques couldn’t be happier to hear his voice. 

The doctor seems to be about to say something, but before he can, Lemony speaks again. 

“Jacques? Jacques…” there’s a sudden urgency in Lemony’s face, “They’ve got something important, they’re going to burn down the museum, we have to stop it.” 

“You have a lot to worry about,” Jacques says firmly after only half a beat of silence, “That isn’t what you have to worry about now,” then to the young man, “If he’s conscious can I take him?” 

“I mean…” the young man starts, but seems to think better when Jacques gives him a very stern look, “He’ll need to write a report but he can do that anywhere, I need you to promise you’ll take him to a better prepared doctor though, there’s only so much I can do in a library. Throwing a book at his ribs won’t help any.” 

Jacques nods, then he looks at his brother. 

“You can tell me everything on the way down the mountain.” 


	3. Mariposa

_ The mother knits  
_ _ The son goes to the war  
_ _ She finds this quite natural, the mother  
_ _ And the father?  
_ _ What does the father make of it?  
_ _ He has his business  
_ _ He finds this quite natural, the father  
_ _ And the son,  
_ _ What about the son?   
_ _ What does he find?  
_ _ He finds absolutely nothing.  
_ _ His mother has the knitting,  
_ _ His father a business.  
_ __ And he has the fucking war.

_ Le fils fait la guerre  
_ _ Elle trouve ça tout naturel la mère  
_ _ Et le père qu'est-ce qu'il fait le père?  
_ _ Il fait des affaires  
_ _ Sa femme fait du tricot  
_ _ Son fils la guerre  
_ _ Lui des affaires  
_ _ Il trouve ça tout naturel le père  
_ _ Et le fils et le fils  
_ _ Qu'est-ce qu'il trouve le fils?  
_ _ Il ne trouve rien absolument rien le fils  
_ __ Le fils sa mère fait du tricot son père des affaires lui la guerre

_ ⸻ _ _ Jacques Prevert, Familiale, 1946 _   


* * *

 

There has been something lurking in the Mortmain Mountains for as long as any of us remember, not as large or formidable as a lion, nor availed of the open sky as an eagle, nor as small and evanescent as the minute and invasive population of crickets we released there a few summers ago, which I am sure at this point has frozen to death or been devoured by snow gnats. This mysterious and lurking creature has been, as you know, the subject of many a V.F.D research expedition. 

As Jacques Snicket maneuvers his vehicle down the severe and unnatural slopes which make up thi sad and severe landscape, one such patrol is making its way slowly up and into the territory of a beast. This beast lies still, and cold, underneath several feet of snow which have accumulated over the night. It is my displeasure to inform you that amongst the volunteers making a freezing, arduous journey into inhospitable terrain, is you, Kit. 

 

Unable to gain permission to visit her unwell brother, a beautiful woman decided the only reasonable thing to do was to take fate into her own hands and join an expedition leaving that night for a place not far from where she’d last heard of him being. This, as you and anyone reading this know, was one of many mistakes this sad, sad account will detail. 

All the same, Kit Snicket makes her way along with a small group of others into the heart of the Mortmain Mountains in search of a very strange reptile. The group left at nightfall last night, the six of them bundling away in thick coats and thicker scarves, but the dark car they had planned to take to the headquarters-not-yet-built had broken down at daybreak and thus a journey that should have been over at noon became much more arduous. For Kit, this delay means hours of cold, wet feet, and a freezing, creeping anxiety in the pit of her stomach. 

Just barely out of her apprenticeship, Kit has spent most of her life more concerned about her brothers than herself. She does not intend to break this tradition, and she hasn’t broken it during the years her youngest sibling has been gone, silent in communication, not so much as a volunteer factual dispatch, not a telephone call, not a letter. 

For the past year she has been convincing herself, slowly, certainly, to accept Lemony’s fate. She has been growing more and more certain that Lemony would never again call, that she might never see his scrawling handwriting written on a paper tucked under her door or into her left shoe, or anywhere unexpected, ever again.

It has been heartbreaking.

Now she’s certain, though, he’s alive, and that means her purpose is with him. A Snicket takes care of her own. So despite anxiety and fear for what condition she might find him in, Kit continues her frigid march in near silence but with an air of determination; she will get to her brother. She will make certain he is alright.

Despite Kit’s silence, her travelling companions are jovial despite the frost and misfortune; like her they wear scarves that cover their faces almost entirely so they are near unrecognizable, but by voice alone Kit can recognize each one, they’re all so terribly familiar. 

Most familiar is her cousin Monty, a short and slight man roughly her age (is she seventeen? Eighteen? She can't remember anymore.) with dark red hair and skin the color of lightly stained red oak. He’s leading the group, despite the incredibly indignant tone to his voice as he talks.

“We really couldn’t send for another car? This is terrible, really really awful,” he’s saying, to the older man just behind him. This man, Kit doesn’t know half as well- only by the initial he goes by (T) and the fact he has been aware of his presence since she was only eleven or so. He is tall, leanly muscular, and graying, and his eyes look like fires about to be set- Kit has never trusted him.

Tailing both of them, an awkward barely sixteen Isaac Anwhistle- T’s apprentice following Kit’s own brother. Ike looks tired, short of breath, he hasn’t been making frequent trips to high altitude like the rest of them have. 

And along with Kit, flanking her on either side are two of three triplets Denouement; Ernest and Frank, the hardest for Kit to tell apart. They insisted on this after she tripped because she’d been so lost in thought sometime after the car broke down, now she simply lets them talk to each other over her head and continues to get lost in thought regardless.

“It’s not far now,” T is grumbling out, and both of the triplets open their mouths to argue when Kit stops short in the cold, because her eyes haven’t been trained on the path. They’ve been trained on the hazy skyline, and she’s just realized why it’s hazy. As their eyes follow hers, they realize too. 

Directly in front of the group, the sky is suddenly full of a dark and choking smoke, being blown in with a bitter wind from where they all know they are going, whether they’ve been there before or not.

* * *

 

There is a word often used by tiresome, somewhat frightening people called lepidopterists (of which I have known a small but unfortunately vocal number), which defines the process of an insect, especially a moth or butterfly, dragging itself painstakingly out of chrysalis and into the adult world. It is a word which has only rarely been touched by writers, probably because of its association with insects of the fucking terrifying fluttery kind.

This word is “eclose”. It sounds like it should not define the opening of something, but the ending. Perhaps most transitions feel the same. Maybe I’m strange.

Nevertheless, Lemony feels he came out the end of living in a world outside his organization something different; he feels he’s changed and he’s not sure if it’s for the better, it’s hard to tell those things until long after they’ve happened. He’s still uncertain if the strange brown caterpillar he was became a strange brown moth or a beautifully decorated one, he will be for a long time.

Jacques finally feels free of something, but he’s still tied to a chrysalis which can be tucked away inside a closet. He’s an atlas moth, carrying a map of where he’s been on still-inflating wings. He’s not sure he can fly yet but he knows he’s changed, he’s not sure if for the better.

Kit feels like something’s coming, swallowtail senses swiftly aware of something changing, but she’s been quicker in developing, quicker in coming to terms with the fire on the horizon than the rest of her kin. She’s changed, she knows that, she knows she won’t know if for the better for a long time. 

Beatrice knows something’s ended the second Kit leaves, she just hasn’t figured out what. Maybe she’s known for a long time she hasn’t been changing for the better but she forgot to remember to watch as the green tapered wings unfurled from her back. She knows they are beautiful, but not yet how deadly.

Olaf hasn’t been paying attention, he doesn’t care. He doesn’t care about transformation, good or bad, he cares about something deeper, something which this organization despite its constant grooming toward eclosion into something beautiful and dangerous for “the greater good”, Olaf has realized is reason enough never to become something for them. Instead he wants to be poisonous, he wants to kill the organization that, six months ago now, took something from him, something he will never get back.

He had thought this organization was his family, maybe he was too entranced by things they hated before, but he had thought.

There is, in his mind no change from this chrysalis, no he wants to rot inside it and poison the tree this terrible hive feeds its larva on. He has never liked lepidopterists but he knows that caterpillars are dedicated to their trees.

That’s what brings him here, taking long decisive steps through what feels like a hallway but is really a pathway between tall emerald trees, dodging their shadows striped bold and bright across the path. If someone sees him he doesn’t care.

He’s having an episode.

They come more often, after he’s spent a long night remembering why he’d rather not speak to Beatrice anymore, why he feels sick any time he looks at anyone on the campus now.

He’s remembering.

He feels sick, and he wants to do something about it.

* * *

 

There is a small, white butterfly fluttering along the line between the horizon and the place it swiftly drops away into what could almost be the sea. Beatrice stands on the edge of a precipice, both literal and figurative. (Maybe I’ve been spending too much time with your brother.) 

Out before her is an ocean of a lake which didn’t exist a decade ago, when she was a child. Beside her is a dear, brave friend. Beatrice looks down, over the toes of her boots hanging off the edge of the cliff, to the sunset reflected on the slowly marching waves, and she wonders as many in the town down the hill did when the tide washed in for the first time;  _ Where did all this water come from? _

Her friend is less concerned; 

“It feels like a beach!” Josephine says, voice raised above the wind tugging at their hair, “Dare me to jump?”

“I don’t,” Beatrice says smoothly, snorting. Josephine looks momentarily crestfallen and Beatrice gives her a sympathetic glance. They fall into silence, eyes skating the horizon where Lake Lachrymose falls away into the distance. The wind blows a tiny sailboat slowly, painstakingly across its rippling surface toward the town down the hill from them. Beatrice wonders how long it took to build an infrastructure around the lake. Humanity moves so fast sometimes. Society is persevering. Beatrice sees it in everything, she sees it in the V.F.D., and in the city always quickly barrelling toward a new era. She sees it in humanity’s constant ever-changing need to steamroll forward into the future, into innovation, into something new and ‘better’, at the cost of what works now, at the cost of anything and everything. 

They sit in silence as the two of them think, deeply, intrinsically and they watch the tide go out, and a tiny sailboat come in to dock.

“There can’t be any more of them,” Josephine says, finally, her eyes fixed on the deepest grey-blue part of the lake that they can see from the hill where there is not yet a house but you and I both know there is a house now (one with a dark entryway and a wide, wide window overlooking a grey, grey lake).

“P says we need to look,” Beatrice says, slowly, softly, as if saying even the initial shouldn’t be done, “I trust him.” 

“So do all of the fire fighting side, I wonder if everyone trusts him too much,” Josephine’s face looks worried, suddenly screwed up in concentration, trying to figure out the worst possible solution.  It’s an expression Beatrice sees rarely on her brave, intrepid friend. She sighs. 

“You’re overthinking, Josephine.” 

“Maybe…” she still doesn’t sound certain, her grey-blue eyes looking out at the slate water, Beatrice can’t help but feel like Josephine, the beautiful tempest of a woman who she loves dearly, was made to exist beside a huge body of water freshly laid but somehow entrenched with a feeling of antiquation. 

“It will be okay, no matter what we’ll make sure we’re safe. We’ll make sure our family is safe,” Beatrice says, and both of them shudder, because while Beatrice may be speaking on what family is now, they’ve both lost people, too recently, and for both one definition of ‘family’ has recently gone cold, hollow, empty.

Josephine nods, though, and Beatrice knows she’s trying not to think; both of them remember families who they loved more than anything. Both of them remember fathers who started fires, and mothers who ran fingers through flames like they were thread. They show their firestarting blood in their faces, echoes of people who destroyed the blood families of other people they’ve learned, been taught, to love as they grew up amongst them.

The Schism has left refugee children on both sides.

“I guess we have to find a boat,” Josephine says, her voice just unwaivering enough to mask how she really feels. 

Beatrice nods, resolute. They have to find a boat.


	4. A Gast iz vi a Regn

_ Dr. Full got to his other knee, and then his feet, and proceeded at a rapid totter down the littered alley toward his room, where he would hunt with a calm optimism at first, then with anxiety, then with frantic violence. He would hurl books and dishes about before he was done looking for the amber bottle of whiskey, and finally would beat his swollen knuckles against the brick wall until old scars on them opened up and his blood oozed over his hands. Last of all, he would sit somewhere on the floor, whimpering, and would plunge into the abyss of purgative nightmare that was his sleep.  _

_ ⸻ _ _ Cyril M. Kornbluth, The Little Black Bag, 1950 _   


* * *

 

By the time he and Jacques can see the hazy bright spot on the horizon that signifies an approach to the city, Lemony has told his brother a hundred novels’ worth of stories, and has left more untold. 

He has told Jacques about the years (was it only two? three?) away from their organization, pausing only to cough through smoke still sitting ragged in his lungs. He has told his brother about the leaves turning orange in the fall in another city far to the west, about cold winter chills on park benches and about close brushes with death, with The Great Unknown.

He has left out other things; Ellington Feint, and a baby he met on a wintery day with no jacket, a hero, as well as a boy much taller than him but not too far in appearance who didn’t so much help him as save him once, in a small grocery store by the ocean.

He leaves out, much to Jacques’ eventual chagrin, the leaches, the lying newspaper,  the secret he has found which he wishes he had not, and the arsonist. This will be dramatic irony, in his eyes, you’ll see.

As the city lights draw nearer, Jacques is beginning to see the holes in his brothers stories and it’s all he can do to channel the frustration of not knowing into depressing the clutch with all his weight. He bites his tongue. Lemony sits beside him and is consumed.

He is consumed with anxiety, with fear of being in a familiar cage, the cage of the V.F.D, with the dread of what he’s hearing spill from his mouth to a brother he felt fleetingly close with at best before his disappearance, at the feeling of precipice before him in his chest.

He swallows all of it down and does the one thing he knows will get him through. Lemony throws fear and dread, anxiety, and every pretense to the wind. He takes a freefall and counts on there being a net, any kind of safety net at all, beneath him. He tries to put every fear from his mind, because if he fails to survive it won’t matter how he did, and if he looks nervous they-the people he knows watch him now as they’ve always watched him, incessantly for every year of his life except those blessed few he stole himself away from them- will think less of him when he keeps on surviving. They will make it even harder. He knows they’ll know how he does in the next few days, the next few weeks, maybe they’ll watch him closely, suspiciously for the next few years.

If nothing else, Jacques is loyal and will report, he’s noble. Lemony can see that in the proud set of his brother’s jaw, the way he wears almost mirror images of his father’s clothing and his mother’s defiant air. Jacques has become a reporter, a detective, a stranger, and someone hauntingly familiar all at once, in Lemony’s absence. And so Lemony asks, as they enter the city on a startlingly familiar road, that startlingly familiar question; 

“What’s the news, Jacques?” 

* * *

The hospital is a long hazy blur of too-bright light and confusing sounds. Lemony borrows his brother’s commonplace book after an hour of arguing about it in the waiting room, and only on the condition he reads nothing inside. This only makes Lemony more desperate to know how his brother has become a stranger to him during his time away. More desperate than he is to solve whatever is obviously terribly wrong with his lungs. 

With his brother just behind him, it would be difficult to hazard a glance through now, though. Lemony commits this to memory and instead of reading he quickly finds a blank page and does what he can do when overstimulated like this; he secludes himself in a tiny room of the room’s conversation fading into white noise, and he writes. 

His half-script-half-scribble forms an armada of EKG lines across the unlined paper in Jacques’ commonplace book, slowly listing downward at the end of every line. He writes out what comes to mind, everything and nothing in a confused slurry, fragments of poems and writings he only vaguely remembers. It becomes a mess of found prose poetry the likes of which only Lemony Snicket is capable of.

I eventually came into posession of this particular page of Jacques Snicket’s commonplace book. A copying of it will be included at the end of this chapter, along with J’s shopping list which can be found on the reverse. I will be keeping the original, I hope you understand.

* * *

The door to Jacques’ small apartment creaks open far too loudly for the late hour he and Lemony return from the hospital with an array of small plastic bottles and an order of bed-rest Lemony sorely wishes he could be excited about using as an excuse to read books and get more sleep. 

Instead he enters his brother’s dwelling with a tired waning resolve for the world and he heads straight for the cupboards, where he finds tragically little.

“You don’t have any food,” are the first words out of his mouth.

“Used the fast as an excuse to clean out my cupboards,” his brother responds and Lemony sees in his eyes that whatever holiday Lemony missed, it feels a thousand years away to Jacques now. Lemony nods and keeps his mouth shut for his brother to say more or stay silent, despite his stomach growling. 

“We’ll get food when the sun comes up a bit more, don’t worry,” Jacques says, and he says it quieter, softer, like Lemony is fragile, paper thin glass or butterfly wings. Lemony stays quiet, nods again. He sits on Jacques’ small, off-white couch and looks at the abandoned, half-evaporated glass of brandy on the end table. Without pause, he snatches it up and downs half, sputtering as he pulls it from his lips. 

He sees Jacques move quickly, and then stop as though torn, one hand raised as if poised to reach out and take the glass from Lemony.

“Why?” he breathes, and Lemony looks him straight in the eye. This isn’t the first time he’s drunk alcohol, it won’t be the last. 

“Hard night,” Lemony says back, levelly, raising the glass to finish it when Jacques’ hand closes around his wrist.

“Don’t drink the shit that’s been sitting out for days at least, Lemony, were you raised in a barn?” 

“You know very well I wasn’t.” 

“Shut up.”

They continue a familiar, comfortable squabble through Jacques awkwardly pouring Lemony his own glass of brandy, and them both settling quietly on the floor around the coffee table. They drink, probably more than they should, and Lemony shares more about the time he spent away from V.F.D. and his family. He tells Jacques about Ellington Feint, but not about the Beast, he tells him about Moxie Mallahan, but not the baby, not the much taller boy.

Jacques tells Lemony about a new friend, one who shares his initials, and about how Kit has been doing wonderfully, beautifully, since she escaped certain imprisonment. He talks about her like a butterfly come to final molt, flourishing and gorgeous. He talks about her in a way Lemony didn’t realize Jacques could even feel about a sibling. He realizes something may have changed, but not with Jacques. With how Lemony sees things.  

And then it all comes crashing down. 

“Kit’s dating O?” Lemony repeats, and then, in a quiet monotone, “You have to be kidding me.” 

“I’m not,” his brother replies, sheepishly.

“He’s insane.” 

“And very intelligent.” 

“How long has it been happening?” Lemony does his best to make it sound as little like an accusation as he can but it still comes out biting, and Jacques seems stung.

“Since his parents…” 

There is a long period of silence as the brothers’ eyes meet, and there is an understanding reached.

“Was it us?” Lemony asks, quiet as if scared to break the silence. Jacques only has to give a single, tiny nod. He busies himself pouring more alcohol for both of them, and Lemony does his best to drag his mind away but it won’t stop catching on the image he remembers best of Olaf, a young boy standing in front of a bonfire holding a small stuffed bat dangerously close to the flames as a good friend of Lemony’s cried for him to stop.

The conversation turns to lighter things but the image won’t leave his head, and the last time he saw Kit, oh god, the last time he saw Kit. Even his subconscious doesn’t want to dwell on that.

He misses his sister so much it aches, but somehow sitting here in a secret place away from the world with his brother he does feel less alone than he has in the past few years. The familiarity comes to rest softly beside him, as if inserting itself into conversation like another sitting at the coffee table, legs crossed and senses slowly blurring to the alcohol. When Jacques finally stands, gathering blankets and pillows from a closet in the hallway and excusing himself to bed, Lemony feels eleven again, cozy with the fact that he may see his brother again the next morning.

The feeling is fleeting. As the door to Jacques bedroom closes, Lemony realizes two things. First; his brother never retrieved from him the small leatherbound notebook which still resides in the pocket of his borrowed coat. Second; as they’d been drinking and becoming more and more unaware, someone had slipped a small folded piece of paper into the crack between the door and the wall.

He crosses the room to dislodge it, then settles on the couch before unfolding it. His eyes cross the page only once, before that image of a young boy, a stuffed bat, and a raging fire flickers across his blinking eyes again. He stands, gathers a few items in a blanket which he ties in on itself, and he climbs carefully out the half open window, cautious not even to make as much noise as a mouse.

The blooming early morning is still just barely unfurling across the dark sky as Lemony crosses the apartment building’s lawn. He wishes he’d thought to find a little money for food, but he’s survived before. He’ll keep surviving.

He unfolds the note again as he heads down the block. It’s from someone he dislikes terribly, it wasn’t intended for him, not even for his brother, or probably for the person his brother was supposed to give it to, their sister. 

Notes are often passed between as many hands as possible in the V.F.D., dirties who they’re coming from or going to. Harder to find out. This one is signed “B”, and Lemony knows too well a handwriting he hasn’t seen for years to think that this is Beatrice, no, it must be the man who came before him with his chaperone, who came before him time and time again with his organization. 

And as nauseous as this makes him, if this letter’s destination is Lake Lachrymose, then that’s where he has to go too. Because he knows who’s there, and no matter how much water she is near, Lemony fears to the very pit of his being that Beatrice is horrifically flammable.

* * *

_**Jacques’ Shopping List** _

**Grocery** -

_ Sugar _

_ Garlic stuffed olives _

_ Stone-ground mustard _

 

**Farmer’s Market** -

_ Blackberries _

_ Those lemon shortbread cookies _

_ Pretzel bread for Kit _

_ Pigeon seed mix _

* * *

_**Lemony’s Found-Poem** _   


_ The night has a thousand eyes,  _

_ And the day but one;  _

_ It is completely unimportant. That’s why it’s so interesting.  _

_ It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.  _

_ A change fell upon all things. Strange, brilliant flowers, star-shaped, burst out upon the trees where no flowers had been known before. _

_ And I decided; I want poetry, I want danger, I want freedom, I want sin. _

 

_ the light of the bright world dies _

_  With the dying sun. _

_ Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them. We were taught to be this way. _

_ Nobility is flimsy. If I but thought that my response were made to one perhaps returning to the world, this tongue of flame would cease to flicker. Sanity is not statistical. _

_ Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter; only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving… _

 

_The mind has a thousand eyes, _

_  And the heart but one; _

_ Everyone had a hand in the elucidation of the mystery. It was rather like a jig-saw puzzle to which everyone contributed their own little piece of knowledge or discovery. But their task ended there. Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. Something higher pulled the strings. _

_ This country wearies us, O Death! Let us set sail!  _

_ Though the sea and the sky are black as ink, our hearts which you know well are filled with rays of light. But since, up from these depths, no one has yet returned alive. _

_ The night has a thousand eyes,  _

_ And the day but one. _


	5. Anise

_ Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters, and assorting them for the flames? For by the cart-load they are annually burned. Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring:—the finger it was meant for, perhaps, moulders in the grave; a bank-note sent in swiftest charity:—he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more; pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities. On errands of life, these letters speed to death. _

_ ⸻ _ _ Herman Melville, Bartleby, the Scrivener, 1856 _   


* * *

 

Briny Beach is cold, grey, and salt-pocked. The wind is blowing hard enough to pick salt straight up from the water and sand straight up from the beach and hurl it against the skin of any person brave enough to walk the shore today. 

The small smooth stones scattered across the sand are beginning to speckle with drops from the grey mess of clouds expanding over the city skyline to the south, and the tourists and late season locals have fled the beach in favor of warmer ventures.

Bertrand wishes he has the luxury of fleeing the damp, bone-deep chill. No, though, he has a duty to fulfill here. He has to find what he lost, the last of the small supply they had. He has to right a wrong, the first one he’s made in years. 

The tidal charts made clear that if they had been discarded to the ocean they would be here, they would have settled on this beach or just off-shore, and then only with the lowest chance might they be washed out to sea again, but Bertrand has been combing the sand and the shallows for hours and he hasn’t seen a single speck of what he might be looking for. 

It doesn’t help he’s never seen them.

He sits, dejected, on the chilly and wet sand after a few more minutes of wading in and out of quickly cooling water. The storm sits like a humongous beast waiting to devour him, he sighs, and looks further up at the sky, where the gray breaks for a bright singular spot at the center of the sky. He’s been searching since before daybreak. He knows if he takes the trolley back to town he can find a telephone, call Beatrice, tell her he’s failed and he doesn’t know what to do. She’ll have an answer for him, she always does.

He doesn’t know what else to do, looking for a needle in a haystack is at least contained to a single haystack, but this? This is miles of beach where something he’s looking for might be, maybe. Bertrand feels hopeless, and as he stands it’s with less determination than he had prior. It’s with an indignance for the world, a tired annoyance at his own failures.

He is a small speck of a black overcoat against the huge, gray ocean as he picks his way back toward the train station, it’s slow and sullen, like someone has died. Like the noble organization he knew and loved is well on the way to dying. In the words of an artist (at best), “The tombstones were waiting, they were half engraved.”

Bertrand is startled to see another speck crossing the beach, toward the ocean as he approaches the station. It is a slender figure, tall and carrying a strange cone shaped object by the tip of the cone. As Bertrand nears the figure, despite coming up behind he is almost certain who it is, and he can discern that the cone seems to be a bouquet of flowers.

“Jacques?” he calls, as loud as he can over the howling wind. His voice seems to barely permeate but the man holding flowers turns and reveals himself to be a different, less aspirable friend. He shakes his head, but waves Bertrand over and as he approaches the figure, Bertrand can see long, white swathes of taut and unnatural looking skin across Olaf’s uncovered arms, being bitten at by salt and sand. He looks away. They’ve all had burns in their time, he can’t judge Olaf for it.

“Sorry, I didn’t really see you,” Bertrand says by way of greeting, and Olaf laughs a thin, strained laugh.

“Didn’t you,” O responds, and his voice is quieter, flatter, than Bertrand has ever heard. He hasn’t spoken to O since… Since the count and his wife died, since Bertrand did everything in his power to argue against that and walked out of a meeting room with no intention of looking back after the vote was counted and fell all against him-all to one. There’s no way Olaf would know that though. 

“What brings you to the beach?” Bertrand says, voice softer. Something in Olaf’s face hardens at the sympathy Bertrand lets touch his tone.

Olaf gestures silently to his bouquet of flowers, and they stand in quiet, eyes fixed on one another. Bertrand nods, keeping his head low, revenant. 

He gestures with an open arm to the sea at their sides and they both look, still carried by a sustained silence between them. Out beyond the sand, the sea carries on in spite of everything, in spite of two gentlemen standing somber a hundred paces from where it laps hungrily at the sand, in spite of a differed, now-lost coastline, of the wars lost and won along its borders. 

The sea carries on, pelted by rain now, and as the two of them approach, Bertrand feels it ready to devour him, huge, tumultuous and grim.

Olaf does not look in his element as they stand boots inches from the water now, his face is pale and as he crouches to set the flowers in the water gentler than Bertrand has ever seen him be, it’s evident in the set of his shoulders and the shine of his eyes that he’s trying not to cry.

Bertrand looks away, politely, but feels sympathy wring his soul. He ignores the tremble in Olaf’s voice when he finally breaks the silence.

“Why are you here, B?” 

Bertrand is about to stumble over a half lie (“I enjoy this beach, most of the time.”) when his conscience catches up to him. Instead, he tells Olaf the truth;

“I’m looking for something I lost,” he says, softly.

“The eggs,” Olaf’s voice is a little more sure as he answers only seconds after the words have fallen from Bertrand’s mouth. He doesn’t meet Bertrand’s gaze, just watches as the bouquet becomes more and more waterlogged and finally disappears underneath the waves. It occurs to Bertrand now that he has no idea what happened, specifically.

O takes Bertrand’s lack of response as guilty affirmation; they both know that’s what it is. He sighs, an exhalation that conveys a tiredness so deep it chills Bertrand to his core. There are another scant few moments of silence, and then again O breaks them.

“Have you checked the cave?” He looks at B, levelly, then quickly finds a stick and draws a crude map in the sand when B looks back, uncomprehending. They stand together and listen to the water moving swiftly against the sand as Bertrand examines the map, commits it to memory, then looks up to meet O’s eyes, grateful. 

“I won’t tell anyone I helped you,” O says, and Bertrand knows it goes on the unspoken condition he doesn’t tell anyone either. He gives Olaf a small, but genuine smile.

“Thank you,” he says.

O smiles, too, or his face comes very close to the approximation of being pleased, at least.

* * *

I am still personally unaware (as I'm sure most people are) of how precisely Lemony Snicket reached the shore of Lake Lachrymose that rainy late summer evening. What I do know is that he arrived, as too many of our generation do, too late to be of much help in dealing with the imminent disaster. (Why do we try anymore, Kit? It's always too little too late- My love for you will be, too, I fear.) 

When Beatrice and Josephine's boat goes down, it goes down halfway and then all at once, like it was waiting on some thread to snap, on something to go terribly wrong or horrifically right, but it goes down all at once after that, and neither of them will be able to remember anything besides gasping and fear and the feeling of leeches slithering past, and the feeling of something else, something much much bigger. There are no witnesses when water fills up the sky on the boat and the girls are left drifting in the lake, but they are lucky enough to drift into the path of a local farmer-turned-fisherman, and be hauled to the beach gasping and frightened. 

When they get there, their brains and veins are too addled by shock and adrenaline for anyone to believe them if they'd tried to tell their story, but they both know they've succeeded in their mission.

When Beatrice sees Lemony nervously pacing a row of benches off the docks, she does something I have never heard her do; she screams not out of fear or sorrow or anger, but of joy.

He wheels around, eyes filled with terror, and then, suddenly, relief, to behold the young woman he realizes now he has not seen since their last midnight rootbeer float rendezvous, three? Four? Years ago…

It’s been so long, and oh god has she become beautiful and his stomach has only ever dropped like this before one time and that makes Lemony sick because he suddenly thinks of the water and the beast, and they’re standing on the shore of a very very deep lake which smells so much like the rustling forest he once knew…

She looks like a ghost of two memories, like something he’s never seen before, hauntingly familiar like all of it but so astoundingly new.

He tries so hard not to fall in love with her as suddenly and completely as he did with Ellington Feint, but the woman he was so previously scared of burning, she and her hair slicked to her forehead with half-brined water from the lake, eyes shining with adrenaline and half-glazed with shock, chest rising and falling harsh and quick, Lemony doesn't know what to do but to fall every ounce of himself in love with her. 

He doesn't know what else to do.

When her body crashes into his, sweeping him up in a hug, he realizes she's gotten just an inch or two taller than him, her cheekbones severe.

She laughs, a bubbling giggle of a laugh, a constant flow from dark, wine-red lips. Lemony doesn't know what to say, so he just laughs too, hugging her back as tightly as he possibly can. He could have never imagined he would have felt so happy to see Beatrice Kornbluth again.

* * *

Jacques Snicket wakes with a cold chill down his spine, heart immediately seized by the knowledge that something is wrong. As he stumbles, head aching through his quiet apartment, he is struck by the definitive sense that his apartment is too quiet, too familiar to how it always feels, too empty. 

He feels his blood racing through his veins and can't remember, for a second, what should be different, then it hits him all at once and a weight settles heavy and sudden in his stomach.

Jacques Snicket dresses as quickly as humanly possible and races to the nearest library, because where else should he start looking? God, it's not like there are clues at home. Lemony is gone, and where? His brain is reeling, reeling, reeling.

 

Somewhere else, his sister's brain is reeling, too.

Kit Snicket stands on the edge of a precipice; figurative, and a valley; literal. The valley spills from steep, white peaks, and falls toward a waterfall, it cradles the skeleton of something burning from one side, the side furthest the library, where only the thinnest of frameworks is, and there is already a growing crowd working to douse the fire with water from the almost-frozen river. Kit, and her companions with her, race toward the crowd as soon as they’ve crested the hill concealing their view from the source of the thick and choking smoke spilling down the mountain peaks. 

Kit's heart moves faster than her feet do, she can't feel it beyond the vibrations in her chest and she feels a distinct cramping pain between her ribs but ignores it. She recognizes, only vaguely, a few people in the small group of firefighting volunteers, but she and none of her companions care; they have work to do, and they get to work.

It's a small fire, but it still feels like a destruction of a home, despite the minimal damage to the unbuilt northwestern corner of the headquarters. 

It only takes thirty minutes, at most, before the fire is left to smoldering charcoal and everyone is looking around for any evidence as to what might have started it, and everyone is cold and shaken and reminded that maybe even this remote place isn't a good last ditch attempt at safety.

Kit, as she searches through the slush for anything at all which might beget a fire, thinks only about how she had thought, she had thought that this would be a place to never worry about fires, about a book she loved being gone in a week or a year, about people she cared about now no more than ash.

She thinks about Beatrice, and Josephine, and the school she would have been going to bed in tonight if not for her choice to be here, and she thinks about how her brother is strangely absent from the small crowd, but she is too afraid to ask about it. They might realize that's the only reason she agreed and send her back. 

Lemony is nowhere to be found, as the crowd slowly disperses back to their work, a sense of silent anxiety stiff in the mountain air as the small research party settles in the kitchen to gather provisions before they set out. It's near pitch dark by the time they do leave. Kit wishes T wouldn't have argued for them leaving that night, she might be tucked up in a thrown-together cot with warm, volunteer-cooked food in her stomach if he hadn't, instead they set out as the cold is so poignant it makes her lungs sing with icy pain. 

She wishes she were back at the school, too, wishes she were with Beatrice, who she'd spent the last few weeks pouring over a copy of Anna Karenina with, carefully annotating and re-annotating a hand-copied version. It had been a familiar few weeks, a few beautiful moments caught in a spiderweb of swiftly moving time

Kit wishes she were not hiking through the Mortmain Mountains in search of a beast that she is unaware at this second, but you are aware now, she will never find, and none of us will find there until Montgomery Montgomery returns late the next spring and finds a single specimen cozily snuggled beside a slowly warming stone not a mile from the almost-then-built headquarters.

But she _is_ there, and it's not a fact she can change, and Jacques _is_ alone desperately searching any place he thinks his brother might have gone without him, and Lemony is experiencing something beautiful and fleeting, and Beatrice is experiencing the drop from the precipice she didn't fully realize she was still standing on, and Olaf is staring blankly at the ocean, he is staring blankly at the flames.

* * *

 

A long time ago, in Jacob Snicket's generation, the generation before, there was a question that hung over the head of every volunteer, and it wasn't "what's in the sugar bowl?", it wasn't "how do we defeat the people who aren't noble?", it wasn't "how do we preserve our nobility?", and it definitely wasn't "what's the most complicated code someone could hide in a refrigerator?"; it was, though, "How do we regain our nobility?" 

Before Jacob Snicket's generation, there was a dark, lonely, and misguided period in the volunteers' history; a chasm more than a schism, something that devoured the organization in its entirety rather than divide it in two. It was Jacob Snicket (and Dashiell Qwerty, and S. Theodora Markson, and P, and T, and Snicket's wife, a beautiful and wild woman born of that chasm, Q's parents, R's parents, O's parents, even,) who stood against that darkness, who went searching deep inside it for something, and who brought back out from that darkness one unique light, which represented a complex network of lights which would become the sole hope for Lemony Snicket's generation; the sugar bowl. 

This item contained more than its contents, everyone knew that from the beginning; it contained a hope that the organization could be more than its past, more than its foundation, and more than the shadowy actions that were necessary for its continued survival. This was both a symbolic and a literal hope; one which, once the schism began, attained a near addictive allure to both sides of that great war. 

When it was lost, shortly before Lemony Snicket's apprenticeship, the schism which had seeds already sown came to germination, a word which here means breaking forth from the entrapment of a seed, hope was lost and both sides needed it so desperately they were willing to blind themselves or the world for it. For search of security of their knowledge.

What many in the V.F.D. don't know is that during this period in which it was lost- a span of six or seven, maybe eight years when no one had it, not us, not the fire-fighters, not even a museum, the sugar bowl's contents were replaced with similar ones, related but not the same.

This is an insignificant detail; trivia. No matter the species, a felid still hunts, and no matter the contents, the sugar bowl will always contain hope. 

It then goes without saying that to go without mentioning that this was the night the sugar bowl was found again would be near-crime. 

It was found again, but not by us, and not by the fire-fighters.

It was found again by a young woman who none of us had been smart enough to pay attention to for many, many years.


	6. Acta est fabula, plaudite!

_ You go for a walk and buy a fake Cartier. It falls apart. Even you can't escape the symbolism. You forget to buy Megan her Tab. Likewise. Your career is going nowhere. Pretty much like this book. _

_ You get home to your apartment on West 12th Street. It's a wreck. Like you. No kidding. You wonder if Amanda will ever explain her desertion. She was a model and she thought you were rich. You never spotted she was an airhead. So what does that make you? _

_ Tad turns up, looking ridiculous in a pair of red Brooks Brothers trousers. "Got any drugs, had any sympathy fucks?" he asks. You notice you've written Dead Amanda instead of Dear Amanda on a letter. Deep. You go to Odeon with Tad and meet Elaine from Amanda's agency. You get some toot and lie about your importance. Everyone ignores you. Are you surprised? _

_ You read in the paper that Amanda is in town. You look at some mannequins she modelled. They have more personality than both of you combined. _

- _Jay Mcinerney, Bright Lights; Big City, 1988_

* * *

  
  


The way that time fidgets its way unsteadily, in stops and starts, through August and September that year is dizzying. It slips away from underneath the organization and before anyone realizes it, autumn has knocked on the door and invited itself in, and now it’s eaten half the pantry and is quite ready to toddle out the door to let the winter cold drift in.

The nights in the mansion have become cold. It’s on the far hills, where Olaf has a view of where the city drops off into the wild, abandoned grassland that swaths the thin stretch of land between Lake Lachrymose and the great, deep ocean. Every wind off those plains has been tangibly infested by a deep chill which burrows through the walls of Olaf’s childhood home. Now that he is alone he has no idea how his mother used to lay the linens in the doors so the drafts were turned away before they ever entered. Every hallway creaks and groans when it is entered, Olaf never learned the ways to make the house ready for the cold and so as the fall draws on, this house feels a chill it has not felt since Olaf’s grandfather’s time brought a winter so harsh it froze blood in the body of anyone brave enough to venture into it for more than a brief foray to the tool shed. And that chill works its way like a pine beetle into O’s flesh.

He never thought living alone would be so empty. He’d always imagined it as freeing. Now it feels like he is trapped within a terribly distorted painting, and he finds himself desperately wishing for a way out of his frame. 

After that day with Bertrand on the beach, he secludes himself, removing himself from social circles he’d been a ghost at best in anyway. Few notice. He doesn’t break up with Kit, but he doesn’t speak to her for a month straight and neither of them call and O figures that that’s enough of a sign, enough of a signal. He leaves it at that and he stops attending school. He reads the few recoverable writings his parents left behind and doesn’t bother to repair the mansion, he doesn’t bother to maintain it. He sits, often in the attic or one tall tower or another, pouring over specters left behind in scribbled pencil lines across often half-burnt paper.

He lives as a monument to the disaster. He lives in reverence of it.

He learned this from someone he met a long time ago, someone he sees during this fall, for the first time in many years. Someone he cannot deny a certain allure of, someone whose writing he steals as soon as he’s returned to the halls of a school he only rarely visits after he stops attending classes. That writing, he acts like he stole thinking it was something else, but he treasures it until he’s teased into returning it by that Quagmire boy who seems to have taken an interest in Snicket since his reappearance. 

This method of acting in total self-destruction ‘in the name of a cause’ is something only Lemony Snicket could teach. 

The cold chill of autumn seeps into Olaf’s bones, and he is bereft, marooned like a poem by Leigh Stein. Sometime in late October when the nights are drawing longer Olaf stumbles, fumbling through the attic for another bottle of brandy, on his mother's boxes upon boxes of photos. 

He sees photos of his parents, alive and smiling and in shadows cast by his own prioritization he sees their friends, their good friends. The Snickets, stand often beside his parents in photos taken against a backdrop of hazy city lights. They're all dressed like they're going to a party in almost every single one. In another, older, he sees a young man dressed in a jacket gleaming with metal studs clustered at the shoulders like a shimmering forest, one arm around his father’s, the Count’s, shoulder, the other around a teacher’s-Beatrice’s father. The young man looks worried but happy. Scared but momentarily content, something they all share. Something tells O three of four people in that photo didn't live to see the worst of this schism. 

Somewhere near the bottom of the box, the photos become scattered. Rarer is his mother's face among the snapshots of memories long left to graves and attics, more common are photos of other people's children. As he delves deeper in the box of photos Olaf feels sicker, more nauseous as he continues. Somewhere deep in the recesses of these memories he finds a scant few baby pictures of his friends, meticulously labelled in his father's hand. 

He tries not to remember the early years toddling behind his mother's skirts, sequestered from the world and from his first encounters with strangers in a shared organization turned friends-now turned something O can't define, something between friends and not that he can't quantify. 

It's been harder to quantify the late night phone calls, too. Maybe that's the confession here. He's trying not to confess it to himself though. He feels anchored to port and drowning all at once. He resigns himself to winter in the same way the mansion, now his mansion, does; creaking with the weight of the wild cold which sets in like dogs from the mountains, slowly bowing under heavy rains and frosts. Olaf resigns himself to slowly dying in short breaths off cigarettes chain smoked in the back courtyard, to decay in his foundation, and to total disrepair. 

* * *

  
  


Beatrice follows summer to its deathbed, a fever so bad it wracks her chest with fire for two months bringing her so close to a darkness unimaginable that she remembers the entire season of autumn in stops and starts, hazy vignettes drunk with fever and foreboding. 

One afternoon in mid-September, she is visited by someone she had come to believe she would see only in notes and passing glances for the remainder of her time left on this inhospitable earth.

He comes in like a shadow, like he owns every shadow in the room. He comes in like a hurricane caught in a glacier, like nature should bend around the patches on his tweed overcoat. He slips through the doorway and alights in a chair not far from Beatrice’s bed and she’s convinced this is a dream. The last time she saw P, he had a harpoon gun pressed to his throat by a masked man, and he was quietly murmuring instructions to her, quietly intoning with every ounce of his voice the words which would become a bible to Beatrice. 

P has a forgettable face, it works in his favor. He has a forgettable most things, and despite that every time Beatrice sees him, no matter the temperature of every ounce of blood coursing through her veins, she sees every thread tied around his scarred fingers. She sees a dozen different mentors who run to P when they have trouble, she sees two dozen volunteers on each side of the schism who call him their friend and a dozen more who rely on him to survive that same schism. She sees every pie he’s carefully dipped his fingertips in. 

And she is impressed, more than disgusted. For that, she sees more than most do about him, and when P enters the room, Beatrice smiles softly, and returns to reading the heavy book of poetry she can barely lift. 

“B,” he says, in a fond voice. She knows he’s smiling without glancing up again. She also knows it’s a genuine smile.

“P,” she returns, cordially but slowly dragging a ribbon down the page of her book, setting it carefully between the pages. It’s her favorite ribbon, one of many she collects for the purpose of marking her books. She does not yet realize how important her ribbons will become to someone else. P’s eyes track the thin line of color across the page, and she watches him wonder something. It passes.

“You’re in no state to help us,” he says, and she smiles softly. She still doesn’t meet his eyes as her book slowly closes.

“But,” she says.

“But what you saw in the lake, what we’ve been looking for,” he says, and she watches him closely as he trails off. The set of his mouth, thin in one corner, pressured, it says he doesn’t really want to be doing this, but he feels that it’s the right thing, that it may be the only safe thing. P is very good at deciding, in the moment, what will be the safest option. It’s part of why he watches them all, part of why he’s allowed in so many pies, to be a ghost between factions’ lines and alliances. As he decides what to say, two pairs of sharp, cunning eyes meet over Beatrice’s slowly staling breakfast toast set on her bedside table. Two pairs of sharp, cunning eyes quickly leave one another.

He decides to say nothing, in those few seconds. He decides instead to bring a small, clear, plastic bag full of water. He hands it to Beatrice, and she inspects it to realize that it’s actually two or three plastic bags holding a small amount of water and a large amount of air, and a single, tiny black tadpole. 

P then digs out of his bag a small glass fishtank, dumping a few items of what appears to be a disguise kit onto the floor of Beatrice’s room to clear it of contents, then setting it on the bedside table beside her uneaten food. 

Beatrice looks between the small, fuzzy shape behind the layers of plastic, and P,, who looks tired, and something akin to apologetic. Beatrice looks again. 

“We need someone we can trust to take care of it,” he says, and the words hit her like a wave, a wall of water slamming against her with all the force it can. “Trust.” 

Her eyes almost well, but she swallows the want to cry, she was taught better than that. Trust, though, god, yes, she can do that, and she nods as vigorously as the headache and fever and the host of awry brain functions will let her. 

P’s face cracks into something lighter, like the sun coming out from behind the clouds, and he lets out a soft sound akin to a bemused laugh.

“I expected to have to talk you into it,” he says. She looks up at him and tries not to trust him, but god, she feels so alone in a bed in a box, this room, this place it seems no one wants to visit besides a very friendly doctor, when necessary. When he leaves he hugs her tighter than she’s been held since she pulled herself dripping from Lake Lachrymose, and she remembers the quivering feeling of fear that that thing put into her. Looking at the bag held in her hands, and the tiny tiny thing inside, she doesn’t understand. It curls itself into a question mark, as if agreeing. 

The autumn spins drunkenly on, the world tilts uncomfortably to the left until late October. Everything is suddenly a secret. Everything is suddenly secreted away.

Beatrice finds herself in the beginnings of being a recluse within herself, and in doing so becomes the most interesting enigma in her generation of the V.F.D. This winter is the one that makes Beatrice, the one we know now, Beatrice.

* * *

 

Jacques follows autumn like a ghost, only realizing weeks or months have passed when they're already out the door with the rest of his brandy. Time is marked in near misses with his siblings and with wildfires raging on the hills, with coffee cups gathering like monks in the temple of the sink, with cigarette butts slowly sprouting into forests in his ashtrays. He tries to reach his family by telephone every time he goes out to the library, once a week at least, and he tries to catch them at the academy, and Jacques curses his quick advancement through the ranks of their organization, his premature graduation. 

Jacques has always been everything his parents wanted him to be, he has always aspired to be greater and more noble, to be more cunning and productive. This autumn he feels something shifting, though. 

When the first snow falls uncharacteristically early, mid-October, Jacques realizes the foundation he built his nobility on - his parents’ nobility - has crumbled without him realizing. 

As he's gotten older, he's realized this is how time works. It thieves and gifts whatever it pleases and keeps moving at such a fast clip that it's impossible to realize what's happened. Change comes cloaked in a disguise of time, and Jacques starts faltering in his disguises. 

The founding principals of disguise are confidence in self and knowledge of the subject. As Jacques feels himself floating further away from himself and everything he built himself upon, the schism to him becomes not something external, but something internal. 

As summer melts away so quickly Jacques can't remember what the air tasted like two days ago, the mountains disappear into a cloak of smoke from the fires raging through the Hinterlands and local forests, it's snow one day and flame the next and Jacques forgets what the mountains looked like. 

When they make a reappearance through the haze a week later, it's like meeting them all over again, his horizon redefined in high definition. He goes to a meeting and feels the smoke hang heavy in his lungs, tobacco or timber, it doesn't matter, he can't speak through the catching hoarseness in his throat. He stays silent and for the first time he sees things he missed; the way O stays quiet, too, so far away, the way Josephine seems now lit with a burning inspiration to continue her nobility, the way Ike, oh god, Ike… the way he trembles, the way he makes eye contact too long with Jacques. It makes Jacques shiver to his soul, because he knows; T was his chaperone before Ike’s, and he has evidence enough to believe what happened to him wasn’t the first of his chaperone’s forays into what he’d called ‘a darker tradition of their organization’. It almost makes Jacques stop going to the organization’s gatherings, but as winter draws closer as does a feeling of isolation. What else does he have besides the group that made him, the tradition that broke him? 

Who is Jacques Snicket beyond the prodigal apprentice? Who is he beyond what’s been given and taken? The winter cold makes the marks that haven’t been on his skin for a long time feel warm to him. The mark on his ankle feels cold, a chain attached to the bone through a thin layer of skin, holding him in place. 

He goes to meetings, he feels sick. He visits Beatrice, and he feels sick. He watches a small shape in a small tank he leant to a man he has some false hope of nobility in, he watches it swim between aquatic plants, and he watches its tail curl endlessly in and out of a question mark. He wonders what is to come, and both he and the monster are sick with a great unknowing. 

* * *

 

 

The organization watches frost turn the leaves orange, and watches the wind tear them from their wooden graves. That season there is a great and terrible feeling of premonition, a feeling of senseless desensitization characteristic of the times leading up to imminent disaster. As both sides of a near-silent civil war of whispers and sparks search frantically for the lost linchpin of their failing empire, snows set in and delay the search until travel and search is easier in the region.

Something seems to move with hesitation, that winter. Something is waiting to break or be broken, or give way under pressures that went unnoticed for years, decades. There is a quiet whispered sentiment which becomes common on both sides of the organization’s great rift; that this organization has lived through the ages, that there have always been a few volunteers to slip through the cracks, always a few clever people set to inherit the world within a quietly decided aristocracy of intelligence and sometimes greed. This organization cannot end because it hasn’t ended yet. It has weathered more than schisms, they all say, despite the memories of any generation before their parents being little more than foggy reflections through aquarium glass, distorted and disjointed, largely untrue. No one knows what’s true about this organization anymore.

And slowly, that realization dawns on both sides of the schism; the secrets each was so busy preventing the other from attaining have slowly faded from memory, as quick and certain as the summer has given way to late season chill. It creates a sense of self-sacrificing capricious explorations, encourages that winters’ plans for dangerous expeditions and risks no other generation would have taken. It slowly sets in place the pieces for a chess game which has no winner, and will only result in the death of a king and most his subjects. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hap birth to me you get a chapter.


	7. Intermission

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Not a typical chapter, just an intermission, do not fear, usual style will return next update. (Happy Friday the 13th everyone)

Kit, is all of this a plea for your forgiveness? Is it a tombstone for the organization that raised us, ruined us, made us? Is this a goodbye letter to a dying breed or a half confessional, half magna carta? This organization has always been an island split in two; a pair of island nations and one war. The only thing that changes year to year is who lives on which side of the divide. 

Modern life was built in fires, my dear. There’s a reason that during our youth there were often long stretches we could devote to hiding from our duties in research and peace. But fire is “in”, a friend (not really a friend, maybe as much of a friend as I’ve been to you) once said to me. It’s true. For the last half of this century humanity has been crafting more and more clever ways to burn the world it’s built to ashes. And I don’t deny my part in that.

If this is an apology, even I admit that it’s not genuine. Maybe it's a warning or a testament. 

If fire can chase me down, it can chase my loved ones down, and it can find you, Kit; it will. One day you, and this organization, and every memory of it, every book I ever copied for its libraries and every action either of us took between its floors and its ceiling, you and all of it will come down like snow on this world. 

This organization exists to unwrite what’s written. What’s to say we all don’t get unwritten with it?

What’s the incentive to apologize for learning how to burn when everything is burning down around you? 

Maybe none of you want to be remembered; you have no reason to think you’ll be remembered as anything but saints: noble. I want to be remembered, though, and this century’s method of fame is fire. We shed our own values for whichever side of the flame we find our loved ones on and we beg for fame. 

Kit, I don’t think I’m begging forgiveness. I’m writing quiet eulogies for the people this schism killed inside us. We’re all graveyards filled with headstones for the people this organization made between our ribs and inside our skulls, and cast off when they lost their value. I’m not the child you fell in love with and I don’t ask your love for the man I’ve become, for this corruption. 

I’ve been thinking of exile— take the long black car that’s been in the garage since my father died and drive a funeral procession out of the city, out of us, out of this. What keeps me here most nights is that I have this suspicion, this sinking feeling, if we set enough fires raging through this organization, we’ll all be able to raise like the phoenix from the ashes. 

Kit, you once lent me a briefcase of yours, do you remember? Or has this schism made you forget who and what I used to be to you? That briefcase was full of a handful of books, and you told me it was your “ode to immortality”, a library on the topic of the foolish idea of being everlasting. 

You know as well as I do that when I look at a page full of words, they become a swarm of gnats, shifting and vile, impossible to comprehend. I was always branded a lesser volunteer for my lack of ability to sit and read a page in its entirety, but I spent three months struggling upstream for you against the whitewater in my brain, threatening to wash my focus from the words.

You thought I’d stolen those books when I finally returned them, but I gave them back to you with each accompanied by a twin— a hand copied version of my own to show you how I’d given my attention singly to every word. You’d told me not two weeks earlier you felt no one paid attention to the words which were important to you. 

I still remember the words on the pages you’d dog eared, despite the way L hated how you’d dog ear the pages of his paper gods. 

I remember passages you'd underlined or that were accompanied by borders of the marks of your fingers resting around the page, covered in soot or wax or minced horseradish and garlic. 

There was one passage I remember from a title which was both translated and presented in the original French on the cover.

“There is only one good. And that is to act according to the dictates of one's conscience.” 

You read that passage again and again. The page had been dogmarked, then unmarked, and marked again. You'd underlined it in pencil and then erased it. The copy I made, I underlined it in ink. 

I wonder what you think now of nobility, Kit. 

I wonder why you and your brothers clung so desperately to it. Was it the family tree you sprung from, had to be grafted back onto every time you fell away from? Were you proving your worth to family members long gone cold?

Lemony’s branch fell from that tree so many times it might as well have been foreign, born of an entirely different species, evergreen to citrus. 

I didn’t ever have the chance to fall from my family tree; when it burned, my branch was severed. Sometimes the thought of you and your brothers being kept up at night with  the thought of that fire makes me giddy. Sometimes it just feels hollow.

I wanted to marry you, you know? 

I loved you like the Hayman Fire, out of burning love letters and landscape laid to waste. I loved your brothers, too.

Jacques was our noble statue; you, I, the rest of our generation, all of us saw the pedestal he stood on. Did you see the way it crumbled at the base? I did.

I saw the way he shook at a party in a house made of glass when he saw you for the first time in fourteen months and thought he couldn’t hide from you what had been done to him. He was wrong. He hid it long enough to grow tall enough to hide the continued suffering behind his childhood’s departure in the rearview. He still shakes to his core in late night storms and it still makes his hand tremble when he’s reminded. I know this organization better than you do Kit.

I know your family better too.

* * *

Maybe this account is half confessional of how closely I knew the brothers you swore you’d never lost track of. Or maybe it’s a plea on my morality. Maybe I just want to know what nasty words you’ll have for me when you read the second half of this sad story. Maybe I’m afraid of those same words. You caught me.

I’m just stalling in intermission intermittent bursts of insignificant thought, stalling the inevitable. Your discovery of the things I concealed until now; nights I stole your brother from the world and made every word which dropped from his lips mine and mine alone. And the mornings, twice in number from the nights, when I tore myself to pieces for the silence left in those words’ lonely wake. The way at first I saw you in his jawline, and his smile, the nose you and he and your mother shared. And the way that after I was certain of reality, the comparisons faded and I loved him differently than you. 

Maybe I want you to hate me for it. It will give me reason to hate you too. I just want to survive, Kit. 

I stopped caring a long time ago about who started the fires and started caring much more about what they achieved. It might suit you to consider the same.

Sometimes your brother spent his softer somber days speaking whispering soliloquies in alliteration. It is a trait shared by many of both your siblings’ favorite authors, but only few of yours. 

One in particular though, is markedly a fan. Tom Robbins, you introduced to me through your “Ode to Immortality”. I went on to struggle through the rest of his work. Though the subject of Jitterbug Perfume was less interesting to my young self than Interview by Rice or the Picture by Wilde, also included in the collection, something in his voice and honest monologues on nobility and fate struck me. 

One of his titles had me try smoking for the first time;

“Three of the four elements are shared by all creatures, but fire was a gift to humans alone. Smoking cigarettes is as intimate as we can become with fire without immediate excruciation. Every smoker is an embodiment of Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods and bringing it on back home. We smoke to capture the power of the sun, to pacify Hell, to identify with the primordial spark, to feed on them arrow of the volcano. It's not the tobacco we're after but the fire. When we smoke, we are performing a version of the fire dance, a ritual as ancient as lightning.” 

That’s what he says on fire in a book you never leant to me and which I never found amongst your library of his titles. 

I remember the exhausted and disheartened night I read those words, in a book I’ve seen no one carry since. I remember how they glowed like embers in my chest and brain. I remember the way when I brought that book to you the way you looked at it with disdain and told me it was one of his titles you disliked, but I saw in your eyes and hands the way you longed to touch it again, the way you remembered in sense every memory brought back from just the thought of those words amongst the pages.

I remember arguing with you after that, sometime lost amid the months I wrote about in this account of the events leading to our organizations’ misfortune. And the way your heart got snagged in the early winter, when it did I lost it.

Autumn the year before the sugarbowl was found again was harsh, and cold, and sometimes the echo of the way my lips stuck to one another for not having opened to speak in so long still sticks to my teeth. I missed you endlessly. It would be a lie to say my interest in your brothers was not a direct result. Maybe at this point I’ve gone through all the prospects of people who could stand to love me in this twisted organization. 

I still miss the way you’d notice when I’d been on the same page of a script for an hour and you’d come read it aloud. I still miss the way the hallowed halls sat warm as hearth and echoing with the heartbeats of families I’d been raised to know.

Do you remember the day we spent, maybe our last day truly together the way we’d been, that autumn? You, and me, and Q, and L, and B, J and R later in the evening, we all set out for a remote spot in the mountains, and in the last few hours of warmth in the season we set out a blanket and drank and talked and laughed and danced and ate food your brother had made and told each other stories until the sun touched the other horizon and the cold set in so intently it drove us from our high mountain perch.

I remember that day in slow motion. Your smile, and L’s, a thing I hadn’t seen since childhood, and B sitting on the edge of a cliff, her hair pulled out into the great beyond. Q insisting he could climb a tree taller than any of us had seen, and the way fear crossed each of your faces differently when he almost fell. 

I can’t remember what we ate, but it was good. It tasted like family, like loneliness conquered.

That day was my last good day, Kit. The last day darkness didn’t plague me, dragged behind me every moment like a dog on a rabbit or fire on wood. It’s the last moment I can cherish, it has been for years. And I’m not the only one who left the last few good days long behind in the days before the sugarbowl returned. 

This organization, this life, this tradition, these families, they ruined us, Kit. They built us to be parts of a machine which has been failing to manufacture itself a cure to its own Ouroboros self destruction for decades. We are built to break and destined to fail. I want you to know all of why I did what I did, because you, of all people, deserve to.

You deserve to know everything. Because you, of all people, are still so dependent, so taken and controlled by the ideals of this organization which has never been watching out for your best interest. You deserve to know everything because this organization delights in keeping the picture half obscured from you, and me, and everyone in this organization.

And I love you, Kit. I don’t ask your love for me or the man I’ve become but I love you, and I love many of the people you love more than you could ever know. This schism has never been a matter of hatred for me.

It’s been a matter of love. Loving you, loving the family who kept me alive, who kept me safe in this shadowy corner of the world, loving others who did the same, loving the people capable of loving me back and leaving the fear of being forgotten in the rearview. It’s been a matter of where my family tree’s roots lay before they burned.  

This schism was predetermined and we both know it, you’re just lucky you got to stand on the nobles’ side, that your family tree was rooted carefully across the line from mine. In the beginnings of the Schism, back when H’s plans first uncovered the Unknown to the greater V.F.D.’s awareness, and before it, in a small society’s defection, noble blood ran strong and pure amongst the seeds of the fire you all fight today.

My grandfather saved your brother’s fiance’s mother from certain death. My father pardoned you, my father saved you and your brother, saved our friends a dozen times.

We have never been the worst of this organization. If we are villains, then so is the noble division of family trees which so happened to grow within the correct geography. 

* * *

Did you ever discover, did your brother ever tell you? What was in the sugarbowl? Before its replacement? 

It’s a question which has plagued our generation, another thing left half unsaid to all of us. Sugar, would be a natural response. It’s what you said to me when I first asked you.

I discovered, though. What’s inside goes deeper, follows the thread of our history tangled through the eras to this organization's origins somewhere close to a vast, dark sea. To the things that lurked in that sea. To the darkness it brought nearly up to the banks and to the fear and emptiness it instilled. 

To discover what was inside was for me to discover the true horror of my home.

The next chapters detail my discoveries. With the sugarbowl, with your brother, with our organization, and with a family tree long sent to ash.


	8. Shray nit, vest oyfvekn got!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh boy, it's... been a while. I'm sorry, so sorry for the absence. But this chapter and the next few are some of the most exciting stuff, and meta I've been sitting on for, well near 9 or 10 months now. If this fic was a pregnancy I'd have a tiny infant. That's, sure a digression though. I do want to give a big bold CONTENT WARNING for implied CSA in this chapter; it isn't anything explicitly happening at the time of the story but it's implied in a past tense and I want you to be able to brace for that if you need to. I also learned in my time away from you all that it's VERY hard to find certain Yiddish poems in the original Yiddish, so, uh, sorry for this chapter's poem not being included in its original language version. If anyone has it, please tell me! With that, happy reading!

_ I am an acrobat, _

_ and I dance between daggers _

_ erected in the ring _

_ tips up. _

_ My lithe body—barely  _

_ touching the blades— _

_ eludes death-by-falling. _

 

_ They hold their breath  _

_ when they watch me dance, _

_ and there is always _

_ someone praying for me.  _

_ The tips shine in a fiery  _

_ circle—no one knows  _

_ how much I’d like to slip. _

 

_ I’m tired of dancing between you, _

_ cold steel daggers. _

_ I want—my blood warming _

_ your bare tips— _

_ to fall.  _

 

_⸻Celia Dropkin, The Acrobat, originally in Yiddish_

 

* * *

 

Despite this story beginning with Lemony Snicket being found after years gone missing, I don’t think I can say anyone has ever really found Lemony Snicket. To find someone, really, requires a great deal of searching. Sometimes it requires you to face a wild bear with only that someone beside you, sometimes it requires walking a very thin, long rope across a vast chasm to meet them. Sometimes it requires identifying who’s actually behind the name that seemingly everyone knows.

While everyone knows L’s name, and always has, I doubt anyone has ever, actually found Lemony Snicket, or whoever Snicket really is, behind the forest of misdirection, behind the days-old newspaper, behind every lie he’s ever told, and every time he disappears, like he does, so often, when he’s needed most. 

I think, though, that the person who’s come close to really finding Lemony Snicket is Moxie Mallahan. The same Moxie Mallahan who you had no idea I ever met, Kit.

The person who’s come closest to knowing L is the same Moxie Mallahan who you never knew I knew loved you. She loved you almost as much as she felt unfailingly conflicted for your brother. The night this account details is not the night that I met Moxie. That happens later, and for a completely unrelated reason to anything to do with Lemony Snicket, I assure you. That last sentence was certainly not a lie. 

 

 

This, night, though, there’s a thick, grey storm pulling itself from the sky over Briny Beach like velcro. Moxie’s shoes are wet, sticking in the sand by the spring seagrass trying so hard to grow despite the out-gone tide. 

Her eyes match the sky, the same gray of ink faded from a page in water. They’re full of a woman who looks like a boy she once knew, a very long time ago. 

That woman, Kit Snicket, looks back at her, and her eyes are heavy with tears that won’t fall. 

“I almost can’t believe half the things you’ve said,” Moxie is saying, her voice a little ragged, her eyes tearing themselves from Kit’s, “but I have to.” 

Kit gives her one of the smiles that only Kit can give, a smile that’s filled with every burden Kit has ever laid upon her shoulders. That smile is a map to find Kit Snicket, Kit Snicket is easy to find, if you know how to look for the real her. Her tired smiles and quiet weeping from the other room will take you to her.

“That’s how my organization is. You learned that a long time ago.” 

“Mm,” Moxie hums. 

Kit watches Moxie’s hand work over the locking mechanism at the closures of her briefcase idly in a misty memory she doesn’t share. Moxie’s steel wool eyes look out at the dark ironclad clouds, and Kit’s follow. 

The silence feels as heavy as the sky is heavy with unfallen rain. 

“You can’t expect me to trust this without talking to Lemony,” Moxie says, finally, after what feels like long enough for an organization to be born, be split in schism, and repair itself a dozen times. 

“I won’t stop you, he’ll say the same. He’s noble. He’s my brother.” 

Moxie’s lips twist in dissatisfaction. Her fingers work over the coded rings of her briefcase’s lock again, as though the memorized pattern is some last reminder of home. There’s a corner of a piece of newspaper yellowing with age poking through one side of the case.

“We’ll see,” Moxie says. Kit takes a long, deep breath. 

“We’ll see,” she echoes.

Both young women part ways without many more words, and without looking again at one another. Their separate lives have taught them similar survival tactics. They both know how it’s safer to see only half the picture. It’s a skill Moxie will take with her into the publishing business. 

As you and I both know, Moxie Mallahan will never see Lemony Snicket face to face again. The closest she will come is speaking to him through a newspaper once, a very long time from now. And at this moment, a young Kit Snicket can’t help the sinking feeling in her gut that whatever Moxie is about to become involved in, or whatever she already is, will be far more trouble than it’s worth for the poor girl. Kit feels the salt biting her skin, her clothes slowly collecting moisture off the fog rolling in. 

As she calls a taxi, Kit Snicket prays for the first time in a very, very long time. It feels like sitting on the deck of the Titanic with a glass of whiskey, asking, “Where’s the ice?” 

 

* * *

 

 

Lemony spends the winter in all the places he used to frequent; hiding from his peers in all the ways he used to slip away behind a book or newspaper, in the corner of a classroom at the school his sister still attends but he’s not sure if he does, in the back seat of a taxi headed to or from the city, and mostly, pushed into the far corner of a small library on the coast of Lake Lachrymose.  

That library will close by the time I’m writing this. A great many secrets will go with it. There are stories there, at the time that Lemony frequents it, that can be found nowhere else in the world at all. And Lemony is, albeit reluctantly, drawn into a singular, unique story between those walls, but he ignores the resident book’s tales. If it were any other time, or any other book that held his attention, he would have devoured this library whole. 

But Lemony spends the winter with his brother’s commonplace book between his fingers. As the world gets cold and the trees lose their leaves, he loses a curtain that obscured Jacques from him. And he feels sick.

The story is one that must be read between the lines. It begins where the guilt of reading his brother’s collection sets in; where the shopping lists end and the poetry begins. 

It starts sandwiched between two french poems, with a hand copied stanza and a note, just following it.

 

_ Life is short. From here to that old car you know so well there is a stretch of twenty, twenty-five paces. It is a very short walk. Make those twenty-five steps. Now. Right now. Come just as you are. And we shall live happily ever after. _

- _I’m starting to wonder if I’m not alone in this. I’m starting to wonder if there are patterns in the things I’m seeing, or if I’m just seeing patterns on the back of my eyelids. I can’t sleep._

 

As he sees the scrawling green pen after the carefully copied passage, all Lemony can think is that there’s something he’s not seeing. Something he didn’t even see that he wasn’t seeing. Something he’s in the dark about, and that until just now he was in the dark about being in the dark about. There’s a second of stillness before he turns the page.

It’s like the bubble of air caught in between two water droplets in a long length of airline tubing stretched between an aquarium and the bucket you’re hastily draining it into. It’s the long moment before the first kiss with someone you’ll learn to despise. Dread and curiousity in equal measure fill Lemony’s veins. 

He turns the page. 

The bubble pops.

Splayed across the next two leaves of paper is a map, like a hulking spider squashed between the pages. The topography of faces instead of places is caught in scraps of photograph connected by ribbons of scribbled writing. Each thread of words is more frayed and frenzied than the last Lemony reads, and more full of a half-concealed desperation. 

Lemony feels the last fraying thread of empirical trust he has for his organization snap.

I couldn’t tell you ad verbatim what the words were. I couldn’t tell you precisely what sentences had the weight to pull that last string from its place tied haphazardly around his heart, but I can tell you the context that made them appear there, strung between faces Lemony recognizes, and those he doesn’t.

 

 

When Jacques Snicket was eleven, he was offered an opportunity most would consider an honor; an early apprenticeship under one of his noble organization’s finest members. He went graciously, he knew more than a great many apprentices do when they begin work under their chaperone. He was a great deal more willing to follow rules, to follow tradition, than most of his listless generation. He was, albeit in a way only Jacques can be, excited. 

At sixteen, he was one of the youngest volunteers in our history to complete his time with his chaperone. Witnesses to this eclosion from the chrysalis of what our foundation considers childhood likened the event to watching a wounded dog flee from a house fire. 

After that, he was careful with his words. He watched what he said, and to who. He kept his chaperone’s secrets. He assumed that this was as he’d seen written, mostly in medical or criminal records previously. That it was isolated. That the things he experienced at the hands of the man who cleaned up V.F.D.’s messes were meant to be kept quiet, because should anyone know they might halt his previous chaperone’s ability to continue doing the good and noble work he did for the organization. 

And then S. Theodora Markson let slip sometime south of his nineteenth birthday that the organization had been watching the whole time. That T had a new understudy, and that Ike would be well-watched, too, that they would be certain it never happened to anyone else.

But time passed, and Jacques Snicket watched the way a gregarious and brave young boy became a young man unconvinced of his own safety, of his own right to existence within the skeleton tree his body had become. 

Jacques saw maybe more than other volunteers had seen, maybe more. 

What he saw he didn’t like. What he saw convinced him of only one thing; his organization is much better at observing villainy, that it ever has been at stopping it.

 

* * *

 

 

Bertrand has worn black for his sister for the past seven months, and a small tear in the left breast of his black overcoat for his father since winter began to hold his home city hostage. Now that spring touches the air, he can feel a tiny patch of sun against his heart whenever he’s outside.  

He has turned down offer upon offer to attend veritably fancy dinners and masquerade balls, in the name of his father’s prophets. But it’s a warm, early-April day that he finally removes the torn jacket, and hangs it dutifully in a closet in which he will leave it until a woman he will marry will move into this house, unsettling the sleeping sadness that lays heavy in its halls. 

Bertrand feels lighter for removing the jacket weighted with the mourning of his family, but some echo of tradition still hangs heavy in his head. Bertrand isn’t even sure if he believes in his father’s god. He just knows he believes in going through the motions meaning, something, at least. He leaves something in the right breast pocket. A pack of cigarettes half-smoked. Untouched for months. B has so many fewer priorities these days.

He exchanges the black jacket for a tawny one. And he turns off the light that’s sat by his bed for most of his memory, he walks quietly out his bedroom door and down a long, empty hallway that leads him out a quiet, empty front doorway. The darkness outside is untouched, waiting for anything to happen. 

The party he attends tonight will be the first time he’s seen Beatrice in months. His chest feels tight but his stomach also quivers at the thought. 

It won’t be a function solely for V.F.D., he doesn’t know how much he’ll be able to speak to her at length, but he hasn’t been able to get news in so long, especially news about her. The past few months have been suspiciously quiet. Few dispatches, few housecalls. In some part, Bertrand wonders if it’s because of some disconnected sympathy. It’s like all his friends know their presences bring with them a sick and anxious underlying connection to their shared secret work. Even the people Bertrand loves, who he’s excited to see, sometimes feel like they darken his doorstep when they arrive. There’s too much to see in the shadows they cast. 

Bertrand waves down a taxi as a quiet drizzle disconnects its first drops from a dissonant grey sky. He listens to the rain on the roof. He feels, in some way, as though he is standing at the maw of the beast, looking down a deep dark tunnel. He feels sick with either motion or emotion. He can’t tell which. So he is silent, and watches rain work its way up the glass until the taxi halts outside a tall, dark building.

The sickness doesn’t pass until Bertrand has worked his way through the lobby with a precision only known to tightrope walkers and those with a specifically V.F.D brand of anxiety. His eyes stay wide open. He straightens his tie. 

Bertrand feels a vertigo he’s never felt in this exact way as the elevator hauls him and half a dozen other sharply dressed strangers up a nearly uncountable number of floors. He breathes a sigh of relief, though, that he didn’t have to take the stairs. 

The landing the elevator lets out on is modern and decorated with a pair of potted fishtail palms so perfect that Bertrand can’t quite tell if they’re luxuriously crafted silk or meticulously maintained and genuine. The volunteer has no time to catch his breath before his elevator-mates are pushing open the door into a wide open room full of well-dressed people of varying degrees of familiarity. Sound comes in like high tide. 

Bertrand shivers as his eyes cross the crowd. So many faces he hasn’t seen in a month or two, but no Beatrice, is what he’s thinking when he’s sharply interrupted by a hand on his shoulder.

As he turns, Dewey’s face, usually uncrossed with the clawing urgency it now has, is grim and desperate. 

“Bertrand, I’m so glad you’re here, and I’m sorry for your loss,” he says, in a hushed tone, as he turns Bertrand toward a long hallway pocked with doorways. They walk, Bertrand trying to match Dewey’s rushed pace while appearing as though this is a normal part of arriving slightly late to a party. Sometimes it is.

“Thank you for your condolences,” he responds, just as brusk. They both know there’s a point to get to. 

“Can you hold a question for me?” Dewey asks

“Are you in danger?” Bertrand answers, or half answers. 

“Aren’t we all?” 

“I suppose, is yours imminent?” 

“I can’t be sure yet,” Dewey pauses to open a door, only to swiftly close it and move to the next, then beckon Bertrand inside, “Regardless I trust you.” 

One corner of Bertrand’s mouth twitches downward, but he motions for Dewey to go on, reluctantly. 

“If I go missing in the next few months, please know that there’s an island.” 

“There are many islands,” Bertrand says. Dewey glares.

“This one is a very specific Island, Bertrand. You’ll know it if I go missing, Beatrice will have details about it, I just need you to hold a question for me.” Something about Dewey’s voice holds an insistence so rare that Bertrand can’t help but respond with genuine care.

“What’s the question?” 

And, in form, Dewey answers a question about a question with another question;

“If it’s not the tide that does it, what makes this island special?”

“That’s all?” 

Dewey gives a single short nod, the intensity not leaving his eyes until Bertrand puts a hand on his shoulder. Only then does it soften, coals dying in the soot of his pupils.

“I’ll make sure that question’s asked, then,” Bertrand’s voice is steady. It carries the promise even if the words are not explicit. It’s enough for Dewey. 

Only when Bertrand is eventually left alone in the dimly lit room, after a quarter of an hour the volunteers spend quickly swapping the scant stories of the months they’ve missed in each other’s lives,  does he realize that he’s stepped into what must have once been a library. 

Now the shelves carefully fit for the bindings of books are full of model ships and statues of strange creatures with hundreds of tentacles or long, forked tongues. The room smells faintly of dried brine, low tide. When Bertrand is again interrupted, his eyes are falling on one particular statue, deep green wood carved into a curious and curling creature wrapped around a faintly glinting shape.

This time, though, the interruption is much, much less welcome than a frightened friend. This time the interruption comes in the form of a high pitched scream, one he knows the owner of. Every fiber of Bertrand’s being strains suddenly against any inclination toward this room or its contents, every thought in his head is suddenly full of nothing more than Beatrice. 

 

* * *

 

 

Beatrice knows how loud she can scream. She’s always used it to her advantage. Beatrice knows the value in a well-timed and well-pitched woman’s scream. So when she sees the stout, forgettable older gentleman begin to approach a familiar figure across the room, she’s been expecting this, and Beatrice selects the closest person she knows.

This happens to be a filmmaker she’s met half a dozen times, half a dozen years Beatrice’s senior, and he’s holding exactly what she needs him to have. Taking a hard left veer into him, she knocks the wineglass from his hand, directly onto the blue and white blouse she’s wearing. The look of anger that crosses the filmmaker’s face is momentary, he understands in the split second that she takes to glance at him with purposefully burning eyes. 

Then she screams, a bloodcurdling scream, and in a higher pitched voice than she usually affects, one that echoes in the open dining room, Beatrice declares; 

“My blouse! You’ve ruined it! You fool! You ass! You must have done it on purpose!” 

The filmmaker wastes no time in assisting with the ruse, regardless of the fact he knows not why she’s doing it. Beatrice only allows herself the shortest flick of her eyes to the corner of the room where a not-quite-associate-anymore stands unaware, flicking cigarette ash out a half-open window, his eyes fixed on the street so far down. The scream hadn’t gotten his attention, but it’d gotten most everyone else’s; including the stout older man’s. He’d halted in his approach.

“Young lady! Very much a mistake on my part, you see. Fumbles happen, this isn’t anything to be concerned about. Designs have not been made on you. Could I offer my assistance?” he announces in just as loud and theatrically ringing a voice as Beatrice had used. There is a commotion in the crowd and Beatrice flicks her eyes meaningfully to the older gentleman as they meet the filmmaker’s. 

And then two young men stand in the doorway to the dining room, and Beatrice is faced with both. 

“What’ve you done?!” Lemony is snarling before he enters the room, the words hang in the air to whispers of a suddenly more engaged audience. 

“Beatrice!” Bertrand is calling as he rounds the corner, and as Beatrice looks both of them directly in the eyes, she feels a sinking feeling of dread. Her hopes of doing this quietly are marooned, lost at sea. 

 

Because of this, this is the night that Lemony Snicket saves my life. I get to that bit next.


	9. Meteorito

_ “No,” said Tuck calmly. “Not now. Your time’s not now. But dying’s part of the wheel, right there next to being born. You can’t pick out the pieces you like and leave the rest. Being part of the whole thing, that’s the blessing. But it’s passing us by, us Tucks. Living’s heavy work, but off to one side, the way we are, it’s useless, too. It don’t make sense. If I knowed how to climb back on the wheel, I’d do it in a minute. You can’t have living without dying. So you can’t call it living, what we got. We just are, we just be, like rocks beside the road. _

_⸻Natalie Babbit, Tuck Everlasting_

 

 

Lemony prefers a party that he arrives late to and leaves early from. Or maybe he just prefers a party that he can quietly wait out at home with a cup of tea in hand. 

But most of all, Lemony prefers a party where his dear, dear friends are going to be, and one where he might surprise them with his presence, with a few good book recommendations, with some first contact in months. He prefers a party at which he can sit in a quiet corner and speak candidly to someone, or where he can slip quietly behind the red pot of a potted plant and listen. 

Lemony doesn’t like a party that contains a poorly-timed scream, or a grave attempt on someone’s life. He doesn’t like parties where people pretend to be people they aren’t. And he doesn’t, at all, enjoy parties on the way to which he is privy to surreptitious whisperings about a crime. 

All that said, there is something exciting about the journey to a party one is late to, all rushed excitement. And there is something comforting about having, for the first time he can remember since his time under his chaperone began, both his siblings within arm’s reach. He hasn’t seen Jacques smile in more than half a decade, not the way he smiles a genuine, excited smile as Kit tells him about a book she read last fall. He hasn’t heard Kit laugh the way she does when she pushes herself into the middle seat in the back of the taxi, and wraps an awkward arm around each brother. 

He missed this, and as the car makes its way the handful of minutes across the city, Lemony is, for the first time in a long time, closer to feeling like he could be happy. Something weighs dirty and burning in the shadows of his mind, though, as he watches Jacques press his knee against Kit’s, as he watches his brother’s eyes flick momentarily to the window, and something quiet and dark pass over his face for just a moment. 

The thoughts are pushed aside by the present, as they often are.

And a tall, looming building hangs over them as the Snickets scramble from the car. Lemony watches Jacques almost grab for his siblings’ sleeves as they step out onto the street, but pull his hands back, killing some almost-dead muscle memory of when he had to keep them close. Lemony steps closer, if only because he wants his brother’s mind eased. Kit, meanwhile, is looking up, so far up her hair falls back against her shoulder blades and her neck looks bent at an almost wrong angle. The building is trimmed in small, shined, faux-gold accents, which are already tarnishing to an ugly grey at the edges. 

The Snickets move as one, a tiny flock of swallows startled from a tree, to a large imposing doorway, with a great deal of trepidation, outweighed only by the excitement of an impending party. 

 

But being late to the party, of course, means being in on only half the story, half the plan. And Lemony, so prone to acting on half a plan, is no fit man to be thrust into a situation in which the few seconds he has to act are also those he has to process the information he has, or doesn’t have. 

The scream comes as the elevator doors open, and Lemony knows that scream. He doesn’t have time to say goodbye to his siblings as he leaves them stranded at the door. The tightness against his chest makes his breath come in weak, halted beats as he skids across the hardwood in the direction of the scream, and there she is, beautiful Beatrice, amid a room of white and gold draperies and black suits dotted among a thousand frills of very fancy dresses. 

He doesn’t think as words tumble from his mouth, but he hears jumbled among them another voice directly to his left, and turns, his eyes catching Bertrand, a head taller and half a head more sense, as always. Lemony has to stop himself from grimacing like he’s tasted something fermented. 

Beatrice turns to them and her face says something’s wrong, but there isn’t time to ask as the man beside her, Lemony quickly recognizes Gustav Sebald, a brother of a good friend of his, jumps into action, nearly vaulting the corner of a table to avoid a younger woman, to halt an older gentleman in his tracks and ask, seemingly politely for a handkerchief. At this point, a tall, dark-skinned man with a polite face and awkward kind of demeanor politely approaches Gustav, the room, meanwhile, erupting into various types of commotion. 

The young couple in the corner immediately flee for another room, while others pile in at the doors to see what all the fuss is about, one gentleman pushes the taller, polite seemingly host. Lemony recognizes Dewey stepping in between the two men, but can’t hear through a sudden cacophony of dissenting opinions and mild shows of physical aggression. 

Then, he sees O.

 

* * *

 

Olaf spends the afternoon waning into evening in a kind of wheeling haze. He’s not sure if it’s the alcohol or the exhaustion. He’s not sure if he’s going mad or slowly coming out of the winter daze. He isn’t planning on doing much more than sitting down with a bottle of wine and the stale cigars left from near a year ago when his father was burnt down to the bottom, so he couldn’t do the same for these cigars. 

Interruptions, however, always come at the worst kind of times, to bring one to the worst kind of places, and thus, it is a young, gorgeously dressed woman who knocks on Olaf’s door. It takes him a minute to fully comprehend who precisely is wearing the floor-length gown, gold and decorated with the swaying patterns of peacock feathers. Esme Genevieve has always carried in her presence a certain eloquence Olaf’s been jealous of, even if she’s never lied or disguised herself with quite the skill O carries. 

He hasn’t seen her since a dinner party at Beatrice’s father’s house, with half a dozen other non-volunteers. She has the same knife-sharp smile. O can’t help but smirk back at her as the old oak door creaks open. 

She invites herself in with a flourish of a gold-bangled, mahogany-skinned wrist.

“Olaf, lovely, I’m taking you to a party,” she says. 

“Why on earth would you be doing that?” he asks.

“Because P wanted to see you! And B will be there, it feels like my two best friends stopped spending time together!  And because _ I _ will be there, which means it’s going to be the most influential party this year, of course!” Esme smiles like a cat who’s just caught the canary’s cage left open before the canary has. 

“You have very high aspirations of your own presence’s effect on a place.”

O is going to sit down as she grabs his arm, dragging him toward the door. 

“Come now, you can’t stay in tonight!” 

O scowls. Esme smiles, a smug and quiet smile that says she knows something O doesn’t. It makes him even less happy about the prospect of this party. Nevertheless, if the idea of this party makes him unhappy, the idea of another night alone now feels repulsive, having someone here, having words move past his lips, it feels like breathing fresh air for the first time in months. He feels like there’s a quietly growing light at the end of the tunnel, somewhere off the north coast of his mind. Maybe it’s just a flame, slowly devouring the dark histories stored there, growing closer. 

He lets himself be steered to Esme’s car, not too dissimilar from his father’s long dark car, it gleams near-chrome in the dying evening light. As she speeds them toward the heart of the city, O feels seasick, and lost at sea. He feels as though he’s standing on the outside of the conspiracy for the first time in years. He feels like there’s something he can’t see, like he’s in the dark, and he’s not sure if he’s still in the dark about being in the dark. 

Dark Avenue is surprisingly light with the gleaming reflections of a drowning sun that scatters gold and red across the ocean before it, and the city not too far from that ocean. O can almost see the shimmering, half-flaming sea far from the window overlooking a tiny balcony, barely big enough for houseplants, at the far end of a large, open room just after the entryway. They’re early, because E seems horrifically excited to meet the recently rich and recently orphaned owner of this penthouse. 

He can see so far out, so far down, it feels like he shouldn’t be able to see as far as he can. Like he shouldn’t be able to reach out this window without the protection of a screen, and see all the way to his family’s house, all the way to the far edges of the city, feel as though he can touch them. 

O disentangles his gaze from the window and returns to E’s side, where she’s straightening the host’s tie. He looks uncomfortable, but not as though he’s going to object. O understands, it’s hard to disagree with that fire of a woman.

For reasons he couldn’t explain, or doesn’t want to, O has a hard time saying no to Esme, even if her ideals so often these days align with the ‘noble’ volunteers he’s begun to resent to his very core. 

Still, when he gives into E’s ideas of how things should go, or where they should, some small part of controllable chaos in his life settles. When he manages to work himself into knots around the way that others need him to be, he feels complete. Because that’s what the organization that raised him taught him to do. 

The more convoluted the knots, the better. 

So be it, if he’s tying himself in knots for the wrong side of this silent war. Everyone else is, why can’t he have a little of the enjoyment? 

The party kicks off with little fanfare, it’s a quiet affaire of cocktails and almost library-volume conversation. O has never had an easy time parsing quiet conversation in a room full of it, so he finds himself drifting from room, to room, to room, just seeking out somewhere quieter where he might be able to draw some small bit of attention to himself. He collides with Esme at random intervals, two asteroids or planets pulled by separate stars, sometimes meeting to do a wild dance across the ballroom in shared orbit before breaking apart to continue the ruse of being comfortable in venues like this. O isn’t sure it’s a ruse for Esme, actually, but he isn’t sure it’s not for anyone. Parties seem like a thing that, on this scale, couldn’t really be enjoyable, but maybe he has a skewed view of things. He finds himself a glass of wine. 

Then Esme is back, dragging Beatrice with her in tow, and O is smiling politely but he feels the inside of his throat burn just thinking of looking Beatrice in the eye. 

“Nice night,” is all he says, by way of greeting. When he glances up, she glances away, just as reluctant to meet his eyes. There’s something else in her flat, almost unsympathetic eyes, something besides the guilt that’s been there since O’s parents died. It was the guilty expression that gave her away, that day, not a week after he’d identified their corpses. It was the guilty expression that she wore like the weight of a large seafaring bird around her throat, and the way her belongings smelled all too familiar, like soot.   

“It’s alright,” Beatrice says, and Esme giggles, as though there’s something she knows that someone else doesn’t know, and O feels a tiny, burning seed inside him germinate into a tiny, burning sprout of a tree which will burn with hot fury for years for this woman. 

O suddenly hates everything about this place, everything about the uncomfortable smiles on the two women in front of him, everything about the tall, tall building.

O realizes, in some final way, something he’s been realizing all year. There is nothing left in these parties for him. There is so little left in this game, in playing as though he’s still friends with the people who hurt him, the people who supported him, once. 

He feels himself slipping, like his society is slipping; and his grip on this crumbling, horrible world with it. 

O excuses himself, and finds his way back to the first room, finds another glass of wine, feels the drunkenness fall in with the rest of the wobbling thoughts through his head. He needs a cigarette, some small portion of the fire that gives him an illusion of control. The world can’t slip from underneath him if he burns it first. 

He needs to teach himself a lesson on the realness of death, he needs to sit beside it, let it reside inside his lungs. He doesn’t think anyone notices him, when he finds the window again, opens it wide enough that he can sit there, on the edge of 46 stories of open air. He lights a cigarette and leans a wobbly balancing arm against the edge of the frame, and O looks down.

It’s a long, long way down.

The street is so small it looks like a miniature set he saw once, so small it looks unreal, like a photograph of the real world. Vertigo sets into his stomach fast, but the smoke keeps it forced to the pit where it sours, O exhales into a great open abyss, he feels a stillness through his veins he hasn’t in a very long time, and an insignificance that’s almost comforting. But only for a moment, because then Beatrice screams, and all that Olaf can think is, good.

It startles him, a little, how much bitterness and vitriol he could hold inside his chest at the thought of her hurt or upset, but the little voice in the back of his head just keeps saying “she deserves it,” and he can’t turn the repetition off. He glares, almost purposefully into the darkness, unwavering, not glancing at her. Even as the rising commotion behind him comes closer, O remains vigilant over a dark gray city. He doesn’t break eye contact with the horizon until he feels a sharp, hefty pain suddenly push into his shoulder blade, and then two desperate hands pulling him back as he feels his body, involuntarily slump forward. 

From there, it’s a blur. 

 

* * *

 

 

Kit remembers clearer, because it’s the moment she realized she no longer cared for O, at least I think it is. Maybe it was sometime sooner, in the coolness of a room she’ll soon have to vacate with graduation, tucked away between a stack of books and whatever her most recent obsession was at the time, knitting, or faberge, stacks of letters, or a looming bowl of popcorn. Maybe it was sometime sooner, but I think the moment K decided she no longer cared for O was when she saw, as she found herself frozen in a doorway, Beatrice Baudelaire looking vindicated. When she saw Esme, not two paces from B, her lips curling into a smirk that O would never see, but would hear about.  When she saw the woman who had been hiding under the table that an old man had been going to investigate, the woman who had sprung out to bury a steak knife into O’s back and push forward.

And when Kit sees that her brother must have put the pieces together, in all the wrong order, she feels her heart sink, because she sees her brother standing wide eyed, with bright crimson blood on his hands as he hauls the taller volunteer (is he even still a volunteer?) from the window perch, and onto the floor. And she sees the would-be-assassin flee through a suddenly shocked-silent crowd. And Kit feels empty. Because she’s already mourned O. It happened somewhere away from him, quiet and unnoticed. She decided sometime in the heart of the cold winter that she knew, someday, she’d see him dead.

  
  


* * *

 

 

Lemony’s brain is an engine working on the edge of stalling, gears almost catching, haltingly stepping toward a conclusion he won’t be sure isn’t correct for years to come. 

He doesn’t really register the blood on his hands but they feel too warm, and too slick. He can’t tell if he’s shaking, but his fingers aren’t steady in O’s shirt. He feels O’s weight on him but doesn’t recognize the fact that he’s stumbling to hold him up. He doesn’t register barking half-hoarse commands to a shocked crowd. He won’t really, in the end, remember the blur of loud and fuzzy sounds and events that happen in quick succession after that. 

What he’ll remember is O’s shaky hand that finds his sleeve long enough into the ambulance ride to hear another set of sirens somewhere in the distance, heading to the same hospital. Lemony feels carsick, but he stays silent now through the ride. He doesn’t know why he demanded to be here, besides maybe a clawing suspicion about his dearest friends. There’s something about the tall, gaunt buildings flying by the windows in the grayscale cast by the light of just-past-sunset. There’s something about the way every portion of Lemony’s life is coming to the fine point he sees he could so easily use to thrust a shiv deep into the heart of an organization he was born inside.

He could poison the home tree. 

Or maybe he just thinks about the precipice he’s sitting quietly against the edge of. An old friend. Lemony has a haunting suspicion he’ll have less of those in the coming years. Maybe he should befriend the point of no return, a thing that could never leave him, not with the way he always trips along the barrier of right and wrong. Wobbly, uninformed steps are all he’s ever thought to take, til now.

He feels his hand curl against Olaf’s as the hospital draws upon the horizon, a bird of prey coming in for the final kill. He can’t think of anything except his passion snapping against the ideals of the organization that raised him. 

Lemony follows Olaf through the hospital like a ghost, and no one notices. His face falls away into the crowd, but it’s struck with tears. He doesn’t sleep through the night, just matches his breathing to the soft breathing of the beast of machines curled around a man who used to be his friend. Lemony notices how slim O is, and how marked with so many small details which make him a doppelganger to Jacques, but also so starkly contrasted in the way his cheekbone raises, in a shorter, straighter nose, a more classically handsome jaw. 

He has long empty hours examining O’s face to wonder why he’s sitting there, motionless. To remember the repetitive feeling of factory work, only half awake, and how that feels not dissimilar to this. To remember the words and ways his father spoke. Lemony thinks of the way Jacques echoed them, and the way the words the Count, and O after him, spoke so similarly, if only a little distorted. Lemony thinks of a graveyard full of trees. He thinks of graves flooded with a sea so old it holds the secrets to anything anyone could ever want to know. 

When Lemony finally pulls himself from the bedside of a still-hazily conscious O who seems incapable of or uninterested in speech to wash his hands of the firestarter’s blood, he thinks of leeches, and of two very, very similar smells. 

He thinks, simultaneously, of a rustling underwater forest left waterless, and of a huge depression in the earth suddenly flooded. A huge lake full of leeches beneath a stern and unforgiving cliff.

Lemony asks a question he hasn’t asked for a long time, and finally, he has an answer. Where did all the water of Stain’d go? 

The soap clatters into the sink, and he pushes his way back out the hall, through a group clustered worryingly around a closed door, through two doctors chatting near a nurse’s desk, and back into O’s room, and he sits, with a strange anticipation. He sits with a renewed spark, because, for a moment, he has the false idea that using an enemy as a companion could ever turn out well, for anyone. 

Lemony makes one more mistake. It’s what makes O fall in love with him. 


	10. The Door, The Book, and The Box

_ Two months ago I went to a crush at Lady Brandon’s. You know we poor painters have to show ourselves in society from time to time, just to remind the public that we are not savages. With an evening coat and a white tie, as you told me once, anybody, even a stock-broker, can gain a reputation for being civilized. Well, after I had been in the room about ten minutes, talking to huge overdressed dowagers and tedious Academicians, I suddenly became conscious that some one was looking at me. I turned half-way round, and saw Dorian Gray for the first time. When our eyes met, I felt that I was growing pale. A curious instinct of terror came over me. I knew that I had come face to face with some one whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself.  _

- _Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1890_

* * *

O wakes from the haze of an incomplete memory to an inexplicable but unmistakable presence beside him. He feels incomprehensibly steady when he wakes, blearily, still in so much pain, to see Lemony, hunched over a thin paperback. L looks tired, so tired that O can’t help but feel a pang of pity to his pained center. The first day awake feels unreal, like being just two inches from the surface of the water but not being able to break for air. 

For the first time in more than a year, O doesn’t have to arrange all of his own affairs- Lemony stays impossibly close during the week O spends in hospital. 

During the long first night that O is conscious, Lemony reads aloud from the paperback. O won’t remember the words but he’ll remember Lemony’s voice, never wavering through O’s whimpering in an unbridled pain. Until yesterday, pain like this had been foreign to O. Lemony’s soft voice only stumbling when he grows tired holds him closer to reality than he imagines he could do for himself. 

And O listens, to the best of his ability, through the way his chest aches a mortal and frightening ache, through the soft breathing of the machines crouched around him. Something dark and choking looms against O’s consciousness, a vast goliath monster slowly leaning against his brain and body. The shallower his breathing grows, the more he can feel the shadowy thing’s weight on his ribs. 

O is impossibly grateful for the constant Lemony provides in mumbled threads of dialogue and plot, it pushes aside a growing fear that if he sleeps he might not wake. Eventually the darkness does take him, but even as he drifts off, those last moments are filled with a voice full of cadence and steady reassurance. He doesn’t notice Lemony is crying. He thinks, if this is death, it might just be okay.

 

Despite all this, the next morning drags O from sleep and into a bright, and sterile-smelling world. And beside him, the pleasant surprise of Lemony already awake. With tired eyes, L greets him, and offers him a mug of almost-still-hot coffee. O almost laughs. 

And the process repeats, hazy days swimming in and out of focus, punctuated with falling asleep to Lemony reading and waking up to hospital coffee. O isn’t sure how much Lemony sleeps, but it couldn’t be much, by the end of the week, he’s caught the guy sleeping at least half a dozen times when he comes back from dozing. It’s all strangely familiar experiences, but shifted. Things Kit or his mother did, but nothing O would have expected from Lemony, of all people. 

O remembers days when Lemony would have nothing but hatred in his eyes for the now-firestarter. O remembers, with great clarity, the way his guilt felt more palpable around Lemony after the first fires. Lemony had always been in some part the spark of life in their generation, and to start a fire was to disappoint that spark. It hurts with every ounce of his being. 

But in that dull aching guilt that comes with the way Lemony now looks at him with a slowly blooming care, O finds a softer thing somewhere deep in the center of the tree that makes up his veins. He feels, for the first time, soft new wood brimming against his blood vessels, new growth in his heart. It’s been a long winter in the hills around the city, but spring is here. 

When O returns to his parents’ mansion from the hospital, Lemony follows. O isn’t sure why, but something about driving the long black car his father left him, returning to that long driveway for the first time not alone but with someone in the passenger seat, it feels like home. Lemony shifts to see his way down to the mansion once they’re past the dark iron gate, and through the cracked window, O can smell the scent of honeysuckle and uncharacteristically early crabapple flowers. 

He watches Lemony’s shoulders relax, and for the first time in a long time, despite the blossom of pain in his chest, O feels almost at ease. 

 

* * *

 

When L follows O home, Lemony himself isn’t really sure why, beyond that maybe just maybe if he abandons everything he’s ever loved, gives into things he’s loved about the things he hated, maybe he’ll find something new. He tries to see the things he hated about Olaf before, but in the afternoon they spend together, he figures out the ways he’s twisted his own vision to see what he wanted to see about O. 

He sees that the library of the old mansion is the most used room, even if O has to struggle through the tomes locked away there. That there are books here he’s searched for before but never found, that there are books chained to tables like they’ve been here half a thousand years. That this room is like a temple, or a tomb. It is hallowed, and it is the heart of the house O has become a ghost inside. 

L opens curtains there, that seem to carry years of dust, like they haven’t been shuffled in so long that even moths won’t touch them for the film of disuse. And early afternoon sunlight fills a library that has a well-used chair near the door, and fresh footpaths through the years of dust that match the curtains, settled on the floor. L sighs. 

He turns to see O searching through a shelf, he sees his hand come to his chin in a way L used to think was pretentious, but now he just sees as, he guesses, a little lost. L feels a soft crackling path of static through his chest, when he crosses the room to help look for the book. 

When they’ve found it, O offers it to him; something quiet, almost vulnerable in his eyes. 

“This was one of my mother’s collection, she read it to me, last time I can remember her reading to me, when I was sick,” the sentences feel disjointed, and O shuffles a little as L takes the book. Its cover is decorated in a faded gold leafing, floral designs splayed against the cover as though trapped and dried. 

Even as late afternoon, and then evening, settles over the library, O sits patiently, listening to L read, both passages from the book, which seems handwritten, and from half a dozen others that catch L’s attention in the library. And L feels momentarily like no real danger is plaguing him or someone he cares about. He tries not to think about the implications of the night that landed O in the hospital in the first place. And O seems to cling to the thought they’re safe, too. When L brings it up over a hastily prepared dinner that evening, O’s face falls, and silence caries through the far-too-large dining room. The quiet left in the wake of an echo. L doesn’t bring it up again. 

O settles him in a bedroom at the end of a hall, its door facing a door O tells him is locked, that he can’t get open.

L spends the first night in that dusty room reading the book. It’s a strange adventure novel, with half-familiar names scattered through fantastic realms. With princes and princesses, and great, world-holding trees. The name beneath the title on the cover page seems almost recognizable, but L can’t put a finger on why. 

He falls asleep fitfully. He hasn’t been sleeping well. The bed is comfortable, but it smells cold, and of disuse, of dust and old fabric. It feels, in some strange way, like long, long ago, when his grandparents might have been alive, or maybe just someone much older than his parents, when he and his family had visited. L hardly remembers those hazy times when his whole family was together. He wonders, vaguely, what they think of him following O home, to the hospital. He wonders if Kit or Jacques was involved in the plot on O’s life. 

L falls asleep with thoughts of knives and blood on his hands, with whispering visions of his siblings speaking in tongues, and with the strange, unsettling comfort of O sleeping half a dozen doors down a long, dark hall. 

When he wakes, it’s to a soft drizzle before the early morning light. His dreams hold onto his brain in tendrils, he doesn’t feel quite right. But nothing really feels wrong either. Maybe different, is the right word. But it’s not really quite that either. 

The crabapple tree outside his window sways under the weight of water, and everything is bathed in the gray-blue of just-before-sunrise. L pads out into the hall in soft socks that keep his feet from the cold hardwood, and he opens the blinds and curtains he comes across along the way. With every window streaming halflight, the mansion’s sagging windows and mismatched floors take on an ethereal quality of stillness and waiting. 

L finds O in the dining room. 

“Thought I’d repay the favor,” is something L would rather forget O says then, when he retells the story later. He finds a cup of warm coffee pushed into his hands, and he sits at the table, and they talk about how hard it’s been to sleep, for both of them, since all of this began. 

And they brush elbows with the idea of flirting with the topic of the schism, but sometime between confession and apology, words slip away into a strained, but not uncomfortable silence. 

The grey light slowly goes yellow and they begin the foundation of the schedule they’ll follow for the next few weeks of relative calm. The two boys go to the library, and L reads, sometimes O reads too, sitting beside him and struggling through a different book’s pages, when they inevitably squabble about the most interesting topics, but for the most part, they stay there in a strange quiet that feels somehow new and familiar to both of them. They sit with their arms touching, either against a bookshelf or in two heavy chairs pushed close together, and in a strange unspoken agreement they share the library for a few hours every morning as it drains into the afternoon. Most often, it is raining in the morning, but warm, and bright by mid afternoon, and L drags O out to the shade of the crabapple tree and they read there, or talk for a few hours, before going inside and starting to cook dinner. Neither of them are fantastic cooks, and both desires a leading role behind a stove, but somehow dinner is made every night. That second night it isn’t particularly good, but over the course of the next few weeks it does get better. 

After dinner, L and O both retire to their rooms, and L can hear from O’s, most nights, the softest sounds of something, probably crying. L writes, in Jacques’ commonplace book, or in a blank one O finds in the library. And the fourth night, L tries to open the locked door. 

He is quiet in leaving his room, but the quiet gasping sobbing has long since been replaced with soft snoring from down the hall. The lock isn’t the hardest one L’s ever come across to slide a thin butterknife through, paired with a pin. It groans as it opens, but the snoring doesn’t falter. 

The creaking door opens onto a steep, winding flight of stairs. It goes so far up L gets half-dizzy as he climbs. He’s sickly reminded of the ascent to the penthouse. 

At the top of the stairs is another door, also locked, and yet easier to unlock. It swings open quietly, but scuffs against the floor like it hasn’t been opened since the frost and thaw made it swell last. 

L feels some part of his own moral center unhinge as the latch releases and the door opens only halfway against the pressure of the massive stacks of paintings that lay just before it. There must be hundreds of canvases inside this room, filled to the brim with nearly nothing else. Each one L can see incorporates an eye. Each one is signed by the same painter. The same author of the adventure story. The same name he’s seen half a dozen times scattered across VFD’s works of art. 

The same woman L remembers being so unreasonably kind before all of this. He sees the box, sitting just an arm’s reach across the chest-high blockade of paintings, but all L can think of is that woman, O’s mother. B’s father’s, his father’s, best friend, or one of the closest. All L can think of is how he can see her kind face in her son’s stern one. How he can see touches of his brother in O, too, in the way in the wrong light or from afar you might mistake one for the other, how he sees touches of nobility through this house and through the villainous young man he’s taken up residence with, and all that Lemony can do is sit on the stairs and weep. 

* * *

 

Kit visits Beatrice with treasonous thoughts on her lips, with words that could spill seeds of fire slipping from her tongue. She comes in the night, wrapped in midnight blue and with a hood pulled up around her hair. She’s started putting it up. She feels it clears her vision. She’s felt so clouded these past few years. Kit’s feet fall on the rain-damp doorstep with a certain reverence, but also wariness. 

She is beckoned inside Beatrice’s modest living quarters with half-baited breath. They both know they have failed where failure is unforgivable, and all that either can think is that they cannot fail the next time, if there is one. That if there isn’t they need a backup plan to burn everything they’ve ever touched, to burn the evidence. 

Kit and Beatrice sit close to the fire and close to each other and quake in fear that night, because both of them fear the way Lemony so quickly rushed to Olaf’s side. They see him slipping, they see their friends and families slipping. They see the great precipice at which they stand and they see themselves slipping, too. 

The rain cries like they do, and it falls on the earth with the same kind of vengeance they hold in their hearts, the same bitter feeling of hopelessness and desperation. 

* * *

 

Jacques feels like a flag battered by the wind, he feels hollow and like the only thing that could fill the estrangement with his own skin is burning it from within with a glass of brandy and a long cigarette. 

He sits on the balcony attached to his apartment and he looks out at the rain from under the awning. He drinks fire and puts it between his teeth and something feels different. Everything feels less black and white, and much, much more gray. He wonders, momentarily, what’s left for him in being noble. 

But then, of course, there comes a knock at the front door. He can hear it faintly through the sound of rain on fabric and the glass sliding door. He slides the plant that lives most seasons on his balcony closer to the place the awning drips onto the balcony as he stands, and goes to answer the door.

Standing on his threshold is a short girl, probably five years his junior, her sun-touched brown hair tucked into a thousand braids. She looks familiar, but he can’t place her until she does a short, surreptitious turn of the ankle to show him her tattoo. She’s the girl he saw in tow of Markson six months ago when Lemony was found. 

She and her lavender sundress are dripping wet, loose hairs slicked to her forehead, gooseflesh raising on her arms. Jacques is momentarily reminded of his sister, and immediately feels his heart soften just a little. And it strikes fear into his heart to see the way she looks at him, with an urgency born of changed circumstance, with tears waiting to fall. 

“Something terrible-” she begins, and he shakes his head, beckoning her inside. He pulls her through the apartment, grabbing a spare glass before leading her to the balcony, where his cigarette still smolders in the ashtray. He sets the glass down beside the second ragged lawn chair shoved onto the balcony, where Jerome has often sat on rainy afternoons like this, sometimes, rarely, Ike. He offers her the glass, the brandy, and she graciously accepts, but declines the cigarette he offers. He brings his back to his lips, breathing life back into it before he starts to speak.

“You’re Markson’s apprentice.” The plume of smoke spilling from his mouth makes her almost-teary face hard to see. 

“Not anymore,” she murmurs, “P took over when I,” and she cuts herself off this time, with a ragged breath. He doesn’t know what she’s talking about, but he nods. 

Jacques crosses one ankle over the opposing knee. 

“What’s your name?”

She looks at him with discerning eyes, the kind that tell him she’s not trusted people with this information often. 

“Olivia.”

“Why is the esteemed P’s apprentice paying me a visit?” Jacques hides his frown behind the rim of his glass. Another unpleasantry hidden behind the brandy. 

“Because things have gotten dire, Jacques, and I know you’ve been focusing on trying to get this reporting job but,” her voice still trembles with almost-fallen tears.

“But you need me. You need a Snicket.” Jacques knows his last name holds more weight than his first ever will. They both do. The look the share confirms that. His experiences have never mattered as much as the role he plays. 

Olivia nods. She takes a sip of her brandy, and, a quick learner, hides a grimace. 

There is a pregnant silence. It has time to carry to term, nearly, by the time Jacques tears his eyes from hers and toward the starry-lighted city beneath, spread-eagle before the balcony. 

“I hate that this is an apprentice’s game. You’re what, fifteen?-”

“Sixteen.” 

“Sixteen. When I was sixteen I was cleaning up messes made by obvious villains. There wasn’t this whole mess,” Jacques voice near-shakes. He stares at a specific light in the skyline and tries not to let his eyes water. 

“The way I see it, we’re still cleaning up messes made by obvious villains,” Olivia says, and even though her voice trembles every word, he can hear a conviction behind it he used to hear in his own voice. He used to hear that in Lemony’s voice. He used to hear it in Kit’s, in Bertrand’s, in Olaf’s, even. He wonders where the spark of this generation went, or if things are just doomed to get messy when you get older. 

Jacques looks at the ripples sent through the glass of brandy by the shaking of his hand. He rededicates himself, quietly, to a cause he knows is doomed, and reaches out to clink his glass softly against Olivia’s, clutched tightly between two white-knuckled hands. 

“To sentiment,” he murmurs, “When it won’t save us, it’ll lead us.” 

Olivia laughs a ragged laugh, the same kind of laugh Kit laughs when she’s so impossibly scared. Jacques finishes the half-ounce of liquid left in his glass. 

“Is there any way to avoid this?” he asks, “Is there a way I don’t help you, and people don’t die because of that?” 

Olivia bites her lip. He meets her eyes again, and she shakes her head. It breaks his heart a goddamn sixteen year old is the one who has to tell him this. Then he remembers he’s, what, twenty? It doesn’t take the dull ache away. He wonders, if this organization ever didn’t force kids into these kinds of roles. It’s a silent war and no sixteen year old deserves to be a soldier. 

He sighs. And then Jacques does what he’s always done, when Kit, or Lemony, or any of his friends look like this, when they’re about to cry. He scrubs his face, and he puts on a perfectly rehearsed and comfortable smile. 

“What do you need from me, Olivia?” he asks.


	11. Pandora, The Lovers, and The Last Lost Continent

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was going to wait to post all three last chapters until I did some promotional stuff and, like, responded to comments because I'm love my commenters, but i FINISHED this goddamn beast and I just,,, don't want to wait to put it out there, so here you go.

In the last quarter of the twentieth century much of the world sat on the edge of an increasingly expensive theater seat, waiting for something momentous to occur. Christian aficionados of the Second Coming scenario were convinced that, after two thousand years, the other shoe was about to drop. And five of the era's best-known psychics predicted that Atlantis would soon reemerge from the depths.

To this last, Princess Leigh-Cheri responded, "There are three lost continents: we are one: the lovers."

In whatever esteem on might hold Princess Leigh-Cheri's thoughts, one must agree that the last quarter of the twentieth century was a severe period for lovers. It was a time a time when romantic relationships took on the character of ice in spring, stranding many little children on jagged and inhospitable floes. 

Nobody quite knew what to make of the moon anymore.

Consider a certain night in August. The moon was so bloated it was about to tip over. For more than an hour, Leigh-Cheri stared into the sky. 

"Does the moon have a purpose?" She inquired.

The same query put to the Remington SL3 elicited this response:

Albert Camus wrote that the only serious question is whether to kill yourself or not.

Tom Robbins wrote that the only serious question is whether time has a beginning and an end.

Camus clearly got up on the wrong side of bed, and Robbins must have forgotten to set the alarm. There is only one serious question. And that is:

Who knows how to make love stay?

Answer me that and I will tell you whether or not to kill yourself.

_⸻ Tom Robbins_ _, Still Life With Woodpecker, 2001_

 

* * *

 

_  
  
_

When the tears clear from his vision, Lemony feels staggeringly tired, but he stands, and turns to face the room again. He reaches for the box, and finds it smooth, cool to the touch and of carefully polished green wood. 

When he sits against the doorframe, the half open door, he feels exhaustion wash over him. And he looks at the unassuming emerald thing in his hands. He wonders if he is about to release some horror on the world, grief, sadness, guilt, or fear, he wonders if he crossed that bridge a long time ago. L wonders, if only for a moment, if he’s taking the wrong direction, but he takes a deep breath, feels dizzy and half nauseous but presses his fingers against the cold metal latch on the front of the box. 

The hinges scrape against themselves. Nothing about this room feels new or used, not like the library that feels at least like a ghost has been living there, or the kitchen, now so frequently used it feels almost like a real home. No, this reminds Lemony of something left long forgotten deep under the sea. A shipwreck strewn across the bottom of a silent ocean. Or at least, the skeleton of where a shipwreck had been. Everything about tonight feels like a secret between him and this house. 

Somewhere outside the high tower he’s climbed inside, the wind howls like a beast waiting to devour him. Lemony hears the timber quake. 

He looks down at the contents of the box. 

Two thin shrouds sit folded at the top, embroidered with curling designs of a hauntingly familiar question mark. Lemony moves them aside with shaking fingers. He feels darkness close over his lungs like the darkness of a deep water closing over his head. Six stones sit neatly wrapped inside the shrouds, and underneath them a pile of pieces of paper. 

Lemony feels his heart run cold. 

The page on top reads, in a scrawling, almost-familiar handwriting, 

THE I N H U M A N E SOCIETY 

( _ or what remains of it. _ )

The truths he finds concealed in that file will be the attached, in paraphrase, at the end of this chapter.

Once he’s read his fill, he feels empty, cold, like a room ready to be moved out of.  He shoves the papers into his jacket pocket. The walk from the tower back down the long, dizzying staircase is like a walk of exile, like he’s binding himself to the earth. It is a Charles Baudelaire poem, he is a swan, or a poet. And he is struck by the weight of the words.

* * *

When you think about the schism, really, it’s always been a linear kind of cycle. We find the things that destroy us and draw unfamiliar and unfounded lines between the people we love. Is that villainy, I wonder? 

Kit, I’ve seen the way you care for anything that can breathe, regardless of its capability of speech. I’ve seen the way you’ll pour your heart out for the things that remind you or define you, for the things that bring you closer to that mirage you label “nobility”. You care for everything that breathes.

You could say I care for fire like it breathes. Because fire does breathe, Kit.

It eats and breathes and sometimes sleeps in hot embers just like you or I do, Kit. 

If you listen close enough, it speaks. 

* * *

Josephine holds Ike’s head against her chest, and feels the dampness of both his tears and the mist. The dark is coming in, off the sea, a bank of storm clouds so thick the sun feels like a distant kind of dream. They’re in the back of a long, dark car painted with an unsurreptitious eye on the back bumper. Josephine can feel Olivia’s knee pressed against the one opposite Ike’s, and she can hear Jacques talking to P in the front seat but she isn’t registering what’s going on, really, until P says, 

“Beatrice could be a problem, in the future.”

Josephine knows Jacques knows her eyes flick up to him. But his eyes don’t falter from the slowly dampening road out of town. 

“Then that’s a problem for the future, P,” his voice doesn’t falter either. Two steady hands on the steering wheel, mirrored by two steady hands on Ike’s shoulders, mirrored by two steady hands on a thick file. Olivia pages through with a soft sound that blends into a rain slowly beginning on the roof. 

It would feel comforting if Josephine couldn’t feel the static in the air. She’s waiting for something to go wrong. The other shoe always has to drop. And she’s not even sure the first has yet. They’re out at sea in uncharted waters with uncharted stars. 

It’s an impossibly long ride. 

Long enough Ike’s sobs dissolve into sniffles, then soft breath, and then silence. Long enough Josephine loses sight of the sea in the rearview, and the mountains a long way off. Long enough that Olivia reads through most of those thick, unwelcoming files of their organizations mistakes. Long enough that Josephine doesn’t know where they’re going anymore. 

The fog doesn’t help, thick and consistent. By the time Jacques stops the car, it’s so thoroughly filled the air that Josephine can’t see much beyond the headlights. 

Or much beyond her arm when she follows Ike, clambering out of the car, and asks a very important question, 

“Where are we?”

And Ike, a few feet in front of her, asks an even more important question;

“And what happened here?” 

* * *

Jacques feels sick to his stomach, standing here in the center of a trainwreck half obscured by fog, telling three people only a few years younger than him but who feel like kids, that this was the trainwreck that, in some small part, changed everything. He feels P’s eyes on him, and his skin feels cold and damp and completely foreign to his body. 

His hands tremble every time he looks Ike in the eyes, so he doesn’t. 

Jacques explains that there may be evidence, or clues, or some sort of information here, and that if there is, they need to find it, if the other side hasn’t already. P watches, mostly in silence, nodding every now and then. The supervisor of a test Jacques isn’t sure he’s passed. 

Jacques’ voice becomes part of the rain, and the day drains away into dread. The kind of dread that comes with knowing by the end of the day, someone they care about, will have lost something horrifically important. 

The fog makes them lose each other amongst the fallen cars, and Jacques can’t help but wonder why nothing’s changed about this place. He knows if it were a clear day, there would be a ghost town, somewhere off west of where they are now. It would stand like a single worn bone poking out from the sands. It would stand a monument to mistakes the generation before them made, and the mistakes they were all doomed to repeat. 

Jacques wonders what other vicious cycles make their home beside the green lumber so important to the V.F.D.. He wonders why it’s this generation that seems to be felling those trees to extinction, or to the brink of it. Why not his parents’ generation? The one who left them with whatever the mess before them is. Why is it his generation that makes so many mistakes, repeats old ones and finds new ones? Are they trying to stop the cycle? Or is it all just like the way a wolf goes mad when left in a small cage, it paces and paces and paces until there are circles in the concrete and dizziness clings to its brain. It’s all madness. 

The fog just makes him feel sicker. Makes him feel like he’s falling apart a little more. Makes reality feel just that much further away. Time falls away before Olivia calls that she’s found something. 

It turns out to be the lumber that defines the evidence. The wood that builds the fortresses, the wood that keeps the demarcation of nobility so strong in each family tree, it’s the green lumber that they find amongst the wreckage, and the green lumber that their trail will lead them to. 

It’s always been the trees.

* * *

_  
  
_

The pages Lemony finds contained in that file tell him a simple truth which has been laying between the lines since he first stepped foot in Stain’d. It’s a thread which quietly connects the tissue of the firestarters to something Lemony’s been trying to deny for half a decade now, and one which surreptitiously trips him toward a greater conclusion. 

When Lemony finds O the next afternoon, perched precariously, uncomfortably even in relaxation, on the edge of a chair in the library, he says nothing. There aren’t words for the deluge of emotion deep in his gut. Lemony watches O scowl over the pages of a book hand-copied in the same writing as that file. 

He takes the open seat, wonders if it was left open for him. He sits wordless and breathless and then stretches up to place his lips gently, tentatively against O’s. His hand falls lightly on the page of O’s book, slipping it from his fingers. 

L says nothing after he’s broken the brief contact, just settles for a few short seconds of silence, and then begins reading at the top of the left-hand leaf.

This is the last moment O will remember as one he feels safe, feels something that sits right next to hope in his stomach, feels giddy, almost, for what might come. This is the last time O will ever think butterflies in the stomach is a good kind of feeling. It’s a feeling that follows him, in small ghosting tendrils, as spring slowly turns over into summer. 

* * *

_  
  
_

Lake Lachrymose’s tiny town is overtaken by a new buzzing with the summer heat, and Esme is overtaken by a dreamlike euphoria which has swept her up since that night, since the party, since she saw a short glimpse of opportunity.

E has spent the last few years on the outside looking in, only tenuously involved with what she is certain is a bigger friend group than her closest friends will tell her. She’s spent years growing further from Beatrice and not knowing why. She’s spent years being slowly, neatly parcelled out of Olaf’s life in tiny portions. 

But Jerome is not only a way into the lives of her now-distant friends, but a way into unmeasurable wealth and success. As soon as she proposed he accepted, the boy hardly seems to want to argue with anything she says. She likes that. It feels like everything up to this point has been a tooth and nail fight just to stay treading water, she deserves something easy for once. 

She’s already decided Lachrymose is a dismal wedding venue, but getting lunch here, with her new fiance, an old friend, and an old acquaintance, makes the trip worth it. It was harder to get the reservation than to slip Jerome and Lemony at the table, go for a cigarette out past the back patio of the restaurant, on the steep shore of the infant lake. Esme remembers before all of the water was here, too. Esme remembers, even, before the leeches.

She and Olaf talk, momentarily, about that. It’s pleasantries, really, before they sink their teeth into the situation at large. 

“Beatrice helped plan to get you killed,” Esme finally slips into the conversation, the words fall from her mouth cushioned by smoke. Her eyes are on the shifting water, not him. She shakes, just a little. This isn’t something she ever thought she’d say to someone she’d once considered a best friend. She didn’t realize death was on the line until a few years ago. She didn’t realize how deep this mysterious friend group of her closest friends went. 

“There isn’t evidence of that,” O says.

“Since when do you care about evidence?” Her hands find her hair, pushing it behind her ears before regaining grasp on her long, pale cigarette. 

Olaf is silent, he follows her gaze out to the water where the late afternoon light fractures off a thousand tiny ripples. 

“We need to do something about them,” Esme breaks the silence after they both watch the waves scuttle across the surface of the water like a thousand beetles.  

“What do you propose we do?” O asks. 

And the idea comes to her like a quiet, mundane miracle. Esme’s dark lips curl around a smile she won’t stop smiling for months to come. 

“We do your old friends a little favor,” she says. Her voice is precisely what O would imagine the cat who just caught a canary to sound like. They return to their seats in the restaurant, they continue the beginning act of a play they’ll probably act out for the rest of their lives. By the time it grows dark, the four of them are in a long dark car on the way back to the City. Esme watches people she used to consider friends converse in the front seat, slips her hand into Jerome’s and thinks of how foreign her life has become to her. 

* * *

There is a quietness that sits right beside death, one that Beatrice has become familiar with. It’s a cousin to this quietness that fills the room of Bertrand parents’ mansion as she and he, and his guest sit on three points of a round table in the corner of the kitchen. Summer’s first light streams through the window and the steam off their mugs of morning tea fills the room with shifting and liminal waves of white. 

Moxie Mallahan has eyes like stone gone cold and dry by a seaside at low tide. She matches Beatrice’s stormy stare. Between them, slate and steel. Both hold a tinny taste in their mouths. 

“Why us?” Beatrice is saying, dark lips forming around the words like they’re a poison held carefully between the teeth and tongue. 

Moxie is quiet, looks exhausted, like days of sleep or food have evaded her and this thing that sits before her is a curse she’d rather pass off on someone else. 

The thing that sits in front of Moxie is lost amongst the table’s other dressings. It’s innocuous. Beatrice has only seen it once before. Silver and porcelain, a hairline crack up one side, beautifully designed, it’s still painstakingly simple. Not something worth making into a symbol of nobility, Beatrice thinks, now. This might change later, but for now she sees it for what it is, a piece of a tea set a quarter full of promises which are unlikely to be upheld.

“I failed those eggs’ parents before,” Moxie says, quietly, “My family and my town failed this thing. I can’t keep what it’s full of. I can’t keep them alive.  I can’t keep the thing itself.” 

Something cold and uncomfortable makes a home in Beatrice’s gut.

Beatrice remembers the morning she awoke from the last throes of last fall’s rattling cough and persistent cold, and found in the aquarium beside her bed, a lifeless questionmark. She remembers reporting this to P, and his reaction, a strained acceptance that comes with knowing the outcome already. She remembers using a small mesh net to fish it from the bottom of the tank, and the way each ridge along its back fell limp against the netting. The way its glassy eyes still stared, unequipped with eyelids to let the inch long serpent-beast rest in death. 

She’d cried to Monty about it on the phone, and he’d said, through tones that said he understood every ounce of her pain about a tiny creature she’d been supposed to take care of, ‘You know aquarists sometimes say if a black fish dies, it’s to save its owner from sickness or misfortune?’ 

Beatrice had let the words work their way into beaded knots in her head, stringing up curtains between her and the memory of quietly burying the tiny corpse, saying nothing to anyone but P, feeling like she’d failed her test. Feeling like she’d broken trust. 

Now she remembers, and it’s pushing back tears that she says, 

“I’ve failed them too, I can’t.” 

Bertrand shifts out of the corner of Beatrice’s eye, the coat he hasn’t retired since he put it on to check on something in the yard earlier this morning rustles with the motion. He’s said little as Moxie and Beatrice have gone back and forth, but now he clears his throat. 

“I haven’t,” he says, with a soft definiteness that says the conversation is nearing its conclusion, “Our organization thanks you for your service, Ms. Mallahan. We thank you for returning what is rightfully ours to the correct side of this Schism.” 

Moxie looks at him, that exhaustion not lifting with the grains of relief that seem to lodge their way into her. 

“Thank you for taking it off my hands, Bertrand,” she says.

Beatrice feels a cold sense of dread worm its way back into her throat. She can’t hear past her heart in her ears. She takes a long sip of bitter, black tea. 

* * *

The truth contained in the file of the Inhumane Society, my mother’s time with them, in my words, not my mother’s, is this: 

The firestarters were born like a great forest. From the ashes of a fire, the fire of a great leader’s death, the seeds split open and revealed inside new life. But those seeds were sown by a society so great and noble the “noble” VFD could not imagine. You could not imagine, Kit. 

You nobles were born of the same people that drained the see from Stain’d, and created Lake Lachrymose. You were the branches of trees which were made strong only through the death of the world around you. The same beast you practically worship now, Kit, the same beast whose eggs and young have been passed through this organization, always with the same result, the failure to save you? That beast lost its home because of your parents. 

If VFD is order, we are chaos. We are nature in its rawest form. We are fire, we bring back forests and return the sea to its intended place. 

Lake Lachrymose stands solemn testament to the sins of nobility in this organization. Nature will always, always fight back against order, Kit. Nature will always have the final say. Over you, over me, and over this entire organization. 

The Inhumane Society stood against inhumane actions made by your organization in the name of order and society. The Inhumane Society was more noble than this organization’s corrupt Nobility ever has been. 

That was the truth contained in my mother’s accounts of her time with the Society. And that was the truth that lead your brother closer in to the heart of my parent’s house, my house, and right up to the edge of the precipice you and I both wish, at least a little, he would have taken the dive off of. 

__  
  
  
  
  



	12. The Author, The Count, and the Curtain Call

_ But I still see him dead in the parking lot at the gas station just down the street. _

_ And I still hear my friend say, "You know, you wouldn't believe the things I saw when I was stationed overseas." But he somehow keeps smiling in spite all of that, while I keep finding ways to push the good out for the bad _

_ Oh, how selfish of myself to always say that it was more than I could take, like it was pain I could not shake, like it could break me with its fingers, throw my body in the lake, and I would slowly sink away, but the Truth is it was sorrow that I made and would not face. _

_ See, I keep falling for the future after tripping on the past. And I am always tearing sutures out to make the anguish last like it defines me. Or reminds me I've found comfort in my suffering and uncertainty in happiness and death, because what's next is such a mystery to me. _

_ I am terrified of all the things I feel but cannot see. Friends and family, put your hand into my hand and lay your head into my chest. You are all that I have left here We are all that we have left. _

_ We are the lovers, We are the last of our kind. _

_ ⸻La Dispute, The Last Lost Continent, Somewhere At The Bottom Of The River Between Vega and Altair, 2008 _

* * *

 

 

It’s funny, the way most creatives pour themselves out for weeks, months, years, even, all for the penultimate curtain call of a single day. Authors write themselves into knots and corners for years, just for that day of publication, an actor nervously devotes himself to the religion of the script all for that opening night performance. Everything from there is falling action, denouement. Creatives exist on rising and falling waves of plot and device, waiting for the prime moments of climax and dreading the curtain call. It’s a divine tragicomedy the likes of which mid-late era Greek playwrights would murder their mothers or children for. 

There is no interest in following a creative past the prime of their magnum opus, but there is beauty in examining the moments of demise thereafter. The day that Paltryville burned, was, perhaps, half a dozen freshly post-apprenticeship volunteer’s prime. On both sides of the schism. 

* * *

 

It’s a warm day in early summer, but the sky is irresolute, marked with pocks of gray clouds and across the mountain range he can see in the distance, Jacques can faintly pick out the telltale ribbons of rain crashing against the peeks. 

Jacques stands in a grove of tall, emerald trees, growing like a thousand concurrent corridors of tea-green trunks. Olivia and Beatrice stand in tow, and all of them listen, because faintly, they can hear something awful on the wind. 

It’s a quiet sound, but one that gnaws into the psyche, reminds one of the mortality of flesh. A million wood-boring beetles work their mandibles against the inside fibers of emerald green wood. And in that sound, the three of them hear the near-silent demise of one of their organizations’ best resources being executed. 

“What is it?” Olivia asks, and Jacques shakes his head. 

“Sounds like pine beetles. Didn’t know they’d take this kind of lumber.” Jacques shifts slowly, uncomfortably to the other foot and puts a hand against the trunk of a tree, then kneels and puts his ear against it.

“They don’t,” Beatrice says, “Usually.” Her sharp eyes watch Jacques like a hawk. 

Jacques hears the scraping louder as soon as his ear is firm against the bark. It’s a wretched sound. 

“We need to find a few and take some samples,” he says, softly, then pulls a small notebook from his breast pocket, scribbles a long note, and hands it to Olivia. 

“I need you to take this to the mill, a few miles up the road, my sister should be there. You know what she looks like?”

He watches Olivia’s face scrunch, her brows coming together in determination. 

“Enough, I think,” she says.

“Good. Give that to her, only to her.” 

Olivia nods up at Jacques, and Jacques feels a deep dread solidify against his windpipe, cold and hard and certain. 

He knows the message will be too late. The message would have been too late a year ago. It would have been too late if it had flown back in time to the day he and his siblings were taken in the night by a dark and surreptitious organization. If it had warned them before they were branded belongings to a society they’d never know the full details of, before they had the tattoos and the scars both physical and emotional to show it. 

It would have been too late, and Jacques knows, because getting involved, putting their hands where they shouldn’t be and their minds to questions that shouldn’t be asked, that’s part of the Snicket DNA, it runs so deep in their blood he doesn’t think anything would ever keep any of them away from it. Maybe death. Jacques has yet to test the hypothesis that even that wouldn’t likely halt a Snicket from getting involved in things they shouldn’t. 

And anyway, a message in their noble organization, is always a message which comes too late. 

* * *

 

Lemony has known about the beetles since an uncharacteristically cold night in late spring when O sat beside him, beside a small fire he’d built in the Count’s fireplace, and O had finally disclosed his, and his associates plans to L. It had taken weeks for trust to make an unsteady sapling of a bond between the two of them. In their quiet, almost-always-hidden-despite-lack-of-anyone-caring-to-look romance, the trust does not come quick or easy. They tiptoe around one another for weeks, and it’s only that late, rainy night, that O finally gives in. Lemony thinks it might actually be hard for the actor to keep real secrets from people he cares about. Lemony’s letting his guard down, but so is Olaf. 

Still, somehow, the plan sits sour in Lemony’s throat. He’s been as close to fire as the hearth allows, or as fighting one requires, but lighting fires sits in his mouth like soured soot and he can’t help the clawing feeling in his gut that he doesn’t want to be involved. 

Then, though, he tells himself that it doesn’t much matter. He made his choice. He took the dive, at least as he sees it. He only half registers that involving him like this is some kind of test that O is putting him through to see if he’ll stay true to a cause. It doesn’t feel like a test though, really, to Lemony. The real test was coming back down the stairs from opening that box and making a simple, resolute decision about the direction his compass would now point. The test is over. This is just what comes after. 

This is the life he’s chosen, right? 

Lemony sits in the back of the long dark car that O drives and watches the dappled shadows of the forest around them slip over the interior, and over the faces of Esme and Olaf in the front seat. 

This moment of calm is too tranquil, too easy. With the two almost-friends-again in the front seat singing along with every heartstring to the radio, the windows down and the summer light warming the upholstery, it feels like a vacation. 

It feels like it should be less fraught with an underlying anxiety that they all carry between their ribs, a weight holding their hearts firm against their stomachs, heavy with fear of this being the point of no return, as though there hasn’t been a point of no return before. The thing is every occupant in that car knows they’re doomed, and they’re just driving further into their doom.

When Lemony starts singing along, too, he feels like a canary in a coal mine. Like he’s singing just to signify his doom. He’s in the band on the titanic, and he’s just waiting for the water to hit his face.

The music carries them all the way to the tiny town strewn alongside a million corridors of emerald and brown trees intermixed, all the way into the parking lot of a lumber mill left half-abandoned for the weekend, a holiday of some sort, Lemony hasn’t been keeping track. 

By the time they pull into a spot with a hollow crunching noise over the woodchips strewn across the car park, the sky is grayer than slate, grayer than soot on snow. It threatens heavy, pregnant rain, but Lemony knows, somewhere in his gut, that this forest won’t be so lucky today. 

O climbs out of the car and the look that he gives Lemony is one that L will remember probably until his dying day. It’s full of insecurity, and uncertainty, but behind that there is a thick, impenetrable wall of hope and true _ thankfulness _ that he’s not quite alone now. For the first time L can remember in a long time, and for the last time he’ll experience for years, L feels more cared about than disappointed in. 

“I want you to go with Esme,” O says to him, after a few long moments of held eye contact, of strange understanding passed between them. 

“Alright,” Lemony says in return, and this is the last thing Lemony says to O, in this strange golden time just before the nightfall of their relationship. 

In some part, they both know that this ends here, but both of them hope with every ounce of their hearts that it doesn’t.

They part ways with hardly a glance, because they both know if they look back it means they’re doing it for the last time, and neither one wants this thing tied off with a bow, tied off in a neat package that says everyone gets conclusion and happiness. If O or L goes down, they’ll take their worlds alongside them.

* * *

O leaves E and L at the lodge, and he waits until long after the door has shut with a definitive kind of thunk to work his way down the rows of emerald trees, to find a path away from the small barely-town into the immeasurable and dark forest surrounding it. And he hears the buzzing of a thousand insects, the miniscule chipping of a million mandibles against hard wood. 

O takes a long, deep breath, and commits himself to the reasoning inside the treason. He dedicates himself, finally, completely, in the name of the cause. A controlled burn will kill the pests, will bring back the fortune of the lumber in its fiery germination of new seeds. 

He hates himself a little for the resoluteness that fills every vein in his body, for the full feeling of consistency he has in his want to burn this beautiful place through the woods. This loathing of the dedication to his cause will bring O well into his adult years. This loathing, however, will do little to stop his actions in the near or far future. 

A hundred yards in front of him is someone who, at this distance, could almost be a child. Someone O never expected to be here. He sees Olivia, hair falling over her shoulder in cascades, haloed by sun.  

Olivia crouches in a patch of sunlight, examining with trepidation a felled branch from a nearby tree with a look on her face full of confusion. She has a long knife on her belt. The kind of thing that tells Olaf immediately that this conversation must be civil. He thinks about E and L and tries to think through in great detail at what point in the plan they must be at. He wonders if they’ve incapacitated the girl he once loved yet. 

He approaches the girl with a grace and measurement that mimics a big cat stalking prey, but he has few intentions with Olivia. She’s simply a complication in his plan. 

“What are you doing here, O?” he asks. She startles like a deer frightened from grazing, falling back and looking up at him as he approaches with a quickly reigned in expression of surprise. She gathers herself in mere moments. 

“I could ask you the same,  _ O _ ,” she returns. 

“I’m here on business,” Olaf says. 

“As am I.” 

There’s something cold in Olivia’s eyes for him, something that says any trust she once held for him has long been left abandoned by the side of the road. O can hardly remember Olivia, really. Just specks of her face through the twisted glass of memory, sitting beside Markson at a meeting, or shadowing behind P on a late night visit to someone he was spying on. He wonders how many children like her have been spirited away between the lines defining their nobility, how many children have surreptitiously fueled the fire of the “Noble” V.F.D. 

He looks over her belongings before Olaf looks back to Olivia’s eyes. In her left hand, clutched tight, is a piece of paper. Olaf almost tells her right then how stupid she is for just holding it out in the open like that. He looks back to meet her wide but somehow measured gaze.

There’s something behind the something cold, something about the way her pupils dart imperceptibly away from Olaf’s when they first meet, that tells him she’s scared. There’s some sick pleasure in that for him, something he wouldn’t openly admit to almost anyone now. 

“What kind of business?” Olivia’s lips twist hard down. Everything about her face mirrors a coolness in the deep shade of tall trees. She betrays nothing beyond the slight flick of her eyes away that gives away the fear Olaf knows is there. She shows no bit of the weakness inherent in infallible nobility. 

“I could ask you the same,” Olaf echoes, even though he knows full well that Olivia is going to the mill to head Kit off. Even though he’s already set a trap in case of this kind of thing. They look into each other’s eyes for a long time, and the second he sees her eyes tremor away again, he’s smirking by the time that she looks back. She knows he knows she’s bullshitting.

“Why don’t you come with me, Olivia?” he asks, and he watches some piece of her break, because he sees behind her eyes, the fear of returning to her friends, allies, whoever they were who surely waited nearby, especially with a failed or less than glowingly successful mission. He watches her sit at the water’s edge, but he doesn’t see the tide take her out to sea. 

“Because I have a job to do for the right side of this war, Olaf,” she murmurs. 

He smiles a smile at her that doesn’t really show how he feels, but shows a little of it, and he pushes past her without another word, because he knows her mission’s failed, he knows she doesn’t need him to interfere to make sure of that. 

* * *

Kit finds her back against the wall. She hates every second that she feels out of power, every second she feels a prisoner against the idea of her organization. Esme’s eyes on hers, her hands flush against her wrists, there’s something sharp and uncomfortable about all of it. 

She watches, out of the corner of her eye, Lemony cast his gaze to the floor, and she spits on the hardwood marked with sawdust. 

She feels cold. 

* * *

Lemony looks up only once Esme’s taken his sister from the mill building with a sharp barked order to go after O now that Kit’s been incapacitated. Everything is dizzy, blurring senses and a deep resentment rising in his gut, in the back of his throat. He feels nauseous. 

Everything feels shifted a full foot to the left, not just unfamiliar but completely inhuman, completely inhumane. He didn’t want to look his sister in the eyes when she was taken away. He’s seen her fate so sharply in relief so many times. 

And somewhere inside that cold and empty nausea, there is a burning fire of hatred ready to take every ounce of the distrust he feels in the situation out on the world at large. Lemony feels, somehow, vindicated by seeing the betrayal in his sister’s eyes when Esme’s hands close around her wrists. He wonders if this is the quick descent into the inferno, if this is the way he follows a cruel and beautiful man into hell, if he’s just doing what’s predestined at this point. He wonders who or what he could follow through hell if not for O, at this point. He feels a little of the inferno burn inside him.

* * *

 

When neither Olivia nor Kit return, Beatrice gets nervous, and she can see Jacques’ fingers twitching nervously against the bark he pulls from one infested trunk. The sun is going down. The sound of summer cicadas softly whispering soliloquies to the wind picks up a nervous tempo. Everything feels both still and shattered. 

Beatrice goes about her work the way she always does, with a steely determination. But she and the older man beside her know that this is failed work, if Olivia’s not returned. That they’ve come to late. The fear of it all wiggles inside her like the larva in the bark. 

Her lips part from too long spent not speaking, sticking against one another, and she only has to get a few words out before Jacques has looked up and is nodding at her, understanding, 

“Can I go che--” 

“On Olivia? Yes,” Jacques’ voice is level, even, like he’s been expecting her to crack for the last ten minutes. Tension in her body snaps and relaxes, she feels nothing but dread heavy in her gut as she turns and can only stop herself from running for a few feet, then she’s sprinting back toward the mill through the sunset stripes of trees. 

And then she trips, on a long string, coated in something and tied between two trees, continuing off into the forest, and as she’s reeling, breath knocked from her diaphragm and stinging in her hands and knees, she watches two familiar dress shoes approach her. Olaf has a measured gate. The pine needles are damp, and smell acrid, nauseating. 

For a long, long second, as Beatrice struggles to get up through her breathless shock, she feels helpless. A fox caught in a trap, she’s certain her neck’s about to be snapped. 

Olaf can see the fear in her eyes when she finally manages to drag herself to a stooped standing, leaning against one tree, her other arm clutching her gut. She takes a deep breath, the pain in her diaphragm slowly releases its hold, and some small portion of the fear leaves, but she still knows that one on one like this, in the woods, Olaf has the upper hands. 

And his cold eyes say he knows, he knows her involvement in the plot on his life, on his parents’. If the look he gives her didn’t say it clear enough, his next words drip betrayal and malice in every syllable. 

“Blood traitor,” he hisses, and his mouth curls into a cruel smile that looks so unfamiliar it’s almost frightening. That’s a smile Beatrice has never seen from O, not really.

“Traitor to nobility,” she returns, but they both know her voice is shaking, he takes a step forward and she takes a step back, away from the stability of the tree. 

“There is nothing noble about this organization. Can’t you see that? Haven’t you been  _ looking _ ?” his voice rasps on the last word, like he’s almost, disappointed? In her. Beatrice is reminded of what P said to her when she thought he’d die, when he probably thought he’d die too, and she feels cold, she feels lost, she wishes she could snap out of this at all. 

“We put out fires,” Beatrice’s voice shakes.

“Have you ever thought of what starting one might do?” Olaf takes another step toward her, and she doesn’t step away, not this time, she watches his left hand ghost its way into his breast pocket and bring out a book of matches. She says nothing, meets his eyes with the least fearful look she can muster. 

“This forest could be cured of this entire infestation,” he continues, striking a match, “Just. Like. That.” He lets it burn until it hits his fingers, and then shakes it out, she sees the half-wince he can’t really hide from her, though. Olaf lights another match, smiles wider, and looks at Beatrice again. 

“Don’t be shy,” he says, each word dripping the same mocking tone she’s heard in her own voice for him. Beatrice tries to step back, tries to flee, but all she can do is watch Olaf take a step toward her, and then another, as ice pools in her stomach.

O grabs her hand, pushing the tiny piece of wood between her fingers, the flame somehow not left damaged by the quick movement. Beatrice shrieks, dropping the matchstick into the pine needles at her feet. She stamps a foot against the tiny flame, but whatever liquid was spilled into the carpet of needles immediately bursts, popping sparks and Beatrice has to scramble back to avoid a sudden tongue of flame growing from the underbrush and catching the length of string between the trees. 

Beatrice watches in abject horror as the wood around her immediately starts to crack and burn and every tree within a few meters is suddenly abloom with fire. A scream rises from each tree that starts to burn, the hauntingly awful noise of thousands of beetles scrambling for an exit and calling in distress. As Beatrice stumbles backward, away from the flames, back in Jacques’ direction, she catches a glimpse of Olaf smiling, and all she can do is hope he dies before anyone at all can ever experience his horror again. The air is suddenly choked with smoke. Soot puffs into the late sunset like a punctuation mark. 


	13. Epilogue

Kit, 

When given the choice that night, Lemony fought the fire. When you stormed back into the lumber mill, punched him in the gut, and showed off your bruised knuckles from beating Esme’s face until you could escape, Lemony sided with you. Lemony sided with his sister, his family, the roots he’s been grafted back into so many times it hurts to see him fall again.   
He apologized and felt, relief, probably. I don’t really know. I know he turned around and fought the same fire no one will believe Beatrice started, no matter how many times I tell anyone who will listen. I know he went on to have a happier life. He’s, engaged now, I think. I’m not sure. You know better than I do, and I figure this letter will find you through him, because I know his last address, but not yours. 

It was a turning point, Kit. There are a lot of things about it that are true in the way your people tell it; there are a lot of things about the noble retelling that aren’t wrong, and aren’t flattering to you or your siblings, but those retellings leave so many things out. I’m sure no one talks, anymore, about how Jacques’ old chaperone treats the children of your organization, to this day. I’m sure no one even bothered to tell you. I’m sure no one told you that the eggs that used to be in the sugarbowl aren’t anymore, now it’s something more important. 

I’m certain there are so many things you’ll never see about me, or about this organization. No, I don’t want your love back; I want you to see with eyes that are unshrouded with loyalty. I want you to see the way this organization will use you and abuse you and leave you on the shore of an island surrounded by uncertain beasts. 

I want you to know, Kit. 

I’ll leave you with this: 

A dissatisfied and irresolute color fills the western sky. The great green forest that once stood around Lucky Smells Lumbermill now lays in blankets across the ground, gray marked with the salt and pepper of ash and soot. Somewhere, along the far horizon, a young man can see the rains coming in, but it’s too late for the smoldering thing before him that once made his family rich, a hundred years ago, that once protected and served his organization, until tonight. 

He’s holding a commonplace book he recently had to replace open in his left hand as he writes one of the most abrupt and abbreviated reports he’s ever written on a fire. He wants to find his sister and his brother, but he’s not sure where to begin. And he knows he’s failed his mission tonight. He knows they have too. So as darkness closes in on him, he is lit by the ember of a cigarette that he burns in memory of this place. He watches the smoke rise into the dark night, and he feels his being wracked with the feeling of timber turned to charcoal, creaking under its own weight.   
He asks himself a question he probably won’t stop asking himself until he dies; Is this the last fire? If not, when and where will the last one they can’t stop be? 

 

Somewhere else, a young woman tends to her cuts, and plots her revenge. She is left out in the ash and she watches the rains come in, she watches her dress be ruined and she feels nothing but cold vengeance inside her. This vengeance will be enacted on the first person she can find to blame and she will be the only person who believes the truth of who set that fire. 

Esme will go on to steal the sugar bowl. She will go on to burn almost as much of your world as any proper firestarter. But she will be too late. Too late to make sure you’re reborn from the ashes like a phoenix, or like the sad facsimile that is later raised on the bed of ashes where Lucky Smells’ emerald trees once stood. 

 

Somewhere else still, a not-quite-arsonist steals into the night in a long black car. His gaunt fingers work over a glass of brandy once he reaches his parents’ home sometime in the very early morning, and he goes to bed. 

He stays alone in that house for a few weeks and feels the slightest pang of loneliness when he realizes the first day home without Lemony that there are two coffee cups in the kitchen sink, still. But he tries not to think too long on it. He smashes the one that was Lemony’s favorite against the rock wall in the garden and retires to his bedroom for long, long days. He eventually finds his way into that tower, and decorates his house with his mother’s belongings, because the one person he ever convinced to really love him, or at least to accept the way his life works now, he did that convincing through his mother’s box of files. 

He eventually visits the school he once attended a few weeks later, on a day when the clouds have made a patchwork of sun against the ground.

He sits on a bleacher in the sports field, crosses one leg over the other and feels the intermittent sun on his back. Olaf notices, at the far end of the patch of poorly kept grass, the honeysuckle has completely given way to the broad-leafed bushes it’s been waging a war against for the last decade. He listens to the small flock of sparrows flitting in and out of the bushes, and he resigns himself to never going back. 

Olaf feels his mouth twist into a frown, and he stands, and for the last time before writing this, Olaf leaves Prufrock Preparatory. He starts the long black car that once belonged to his father.

And he drives for a long, long time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you guys for sticking with me to the end of this one! (If you've caught wind this is only part one of a much larger thing; that wind is not lying to you! However the second installment of this fic may well have to wait a few months while I focus on other things.) If you ever want to chat about the story, or anything at all, you can find me by commenting here, by emailing me (inky.newtz@gmail.com) or by checking out my sick ASOUE tumblr (sub-librarian). 
> 
> Thank you again for sticking with this fic til the end! 13 chapters and almost a year of work, but here it all finally is, laid out for all to see.


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